We planned a hike today around Gisburn Forest, which is within the Forest of Bowland and therefore a POTA park. We set off dressed lightly, and for a change I wasn’t carrying a radio. We did a loop of about 6km and discussed heading back to the car and grabbing radios and then doing the loop again but this time to activate the park. At this point though, it was getting pretty late in the day and we only had about 60 minutes of light remaining.
I grabbed my TX-500 and my headtorch, then we headed off back into the Forest. This is not my first activation for GB-0219, in fact it’s my fourth. I’ve activated it previously SSB only as well as FT8 only. This time I thought I’d see if I could start making progress towards the N1CC award. This award requires you to activate 10 parks on 10 bands – I’ve already activated GB-0219 on four different bands, so I just wanted an easy activation, but to add at least one more band to the list. This activation…did not go well.
I originally jumped on 80m but was having some problem tuning the antenna to that band. The truth is, I could have stuck with it and figured out the problem but instead I thought it best to try and get as many QSOs in as I could, before we lost the light, and then attempt to get an extra brand. So I jumped on 40m which was absolutely packed, finding any gap in the band to activate was difficult. Over the course of 30 minutes, I managed to make 4 QSOs, very slow progress. We started losing the light and talked about the best plan for the activation, we decided that it was safer and easier to head back to the car and activate from there. I thought I’d jump on FT8 and make 6 quick QSOs in no time at all and we’d be done.
Headtorches on we made our way along the 1.5km back to the vehicle, with the light slowly fading. It was complete darkness by time we go back to the car park. There was one vehicle there which seemed to be setting up to camp overnight in the Forest and another vehicle with a group of young lads cooking food, playing music, and smoking weed.
I stumbled in the dark to set up for 10 meters, figuring I’d get a contact on there and then swap back to 40m to finish off the activation. Being a QRP station makes it tough sometimes, but a Canadian station stuck with me on FT8 and we made the contact – he gave me a -24 signal report, but I had him at +13. That means I’d made a contact on my 5th band for that park, and so I was happy. The plan was to move back to 40m and make 5 more contacts to complete the park.
At this point it was completely pitch black, other than a small puddle of light given off by my headtorch. For some reason I was feeling really stressed by the activation. We’d been out here for several hours, I was tired and I just wanted to make my contacts and close down the station. Rushing, I set up my MC-750 antenna for 40m. I put down the tripod, put on the 7MHz coil, got out the telescopic whip. I grabbed the top of the whip to extend it to the right height…and it came off in my hand.
Standing in a pitch black car park, holding the top two segments of the only 40m antenna I had with us, I leaned into the car and said to my partner…I broke it. After some confusion and some more explanation as to what happened, I also managed to trap the coax in the car door, leaving a visible indentation across my POTAflex 7.
Yeah, time to pack up, today was not the day to activate this park.
A photo taken just after we got the portable station packed up and started to head back down to the car.