This was my first Parks on the Air activation and whilst my primary goal was to successfully activate the park, my second goal was to do this activation entirely on data and to use no more power than my IC-705 couple produce itself (10 watts). I’ve been playing around a lot with FT8 and JS8Call recently and this was kind of the end of that journey. Whenever I do a SOTA activation I always jump straight onto VHF FM before falling back to HF SSB if I still need contacts, so this “data only activation” was something different for me.
As POTA does not require you to carry everything into the activation zone, and in fact activations from vehicles are allowed, I decided to set up my station on the bed of my truck and to use my Latitude 7212 Rugged Tablet with keyboard. I was still logging manually into my Rite in the Rain notebook, although of course everything was logged by WSJT-X too.
I set up the IC-705 into a Chelegance MC-750 and jumped on the 20m band. I made my first contact with TA1KYN at 14:41 UTC and then I found that I had already contacted all of the stations calling CQ on 20m! So I decided to move over to the 15m band instead – and I contacted OE6HTG at 16:10 UTC.
I quickly hit the same roadblock though, finding that I had already contacted all of the stations calling CQ. Whilst this isn’t a problem, and many stations are happy to connect again (especially on different bands or if it’s been a while since you connected), it’s always nice to get new contacts on your activations. In fact, my third contact was DJ0MAB at 15:10 UTC – and this was the third time this week I had contacted that station, and the second today! Like I said, I’ve really been doing a lot of FT8 recently so I shouldn’t be surprised that I’ve already hit most stations on 20m and 15m since I’ve been so active on those bands recently.
I made two more duplicate contacts (with IK4LZH and EA5D) before finally getting two new stations (2E0FMP and OE4KSF). Thanks to 2E0FMP for sticking with me, I got a -25 signal report from them so it was only just workable!
Since I was away from the noise and struggling to find any new stations (and no one was coming back to my CQs!) I decided to move over to the 17m band – a band I’ve never previously activated, so I hoped there’s be some new people to connect with. I quickly got two more contacts (RX3ASQ and K1BZ, at 16:01 UTC) and then…nothing.
At some point my external battery died, dropping my power output from 10 watts to 5 watts! I was on my spare battery so it wasn’t charged prior to this activation, so I swapped to my main battery – and boy did that upset my radio. I honestly don’t know why but after disconnecting the battery and continuing with the activation I was getting errors in WSJT-X and it seemed the ALC had jumped right up. Perhaps I knocked the power meter without noticing. After swapping the battery and messing with my audio settings I finally got back on the air – but I didn’t make another contact for 40 minutes. I was at 9 contacts and only needed one more to complete the activation and of course, the universe was against me and really made me work for it.
At 40 silent minutes, I connected with IU7HYG and TM80DP at 16:42, finally nudging me past the minimum 10 QSOs with a total of 11 for this activation, and I had successfully activated the park! 11 QSOs total (1 on 20m, 6 on 15m and 4 on 17m).
Failures
I don’t know why my IC-705 became upset when I changed the battery, perhaps I messed something up without realizing, but it took me nearly 40 minutes to get back to making contacts and that was disappointingly slow. Whilst I was a little slow since I’ve not used my IC-705 recently (in favour of my FT-857D), I really need to get faster at debugging these issues and getting back to work. Perhaps I can practice injecting some faults into my activations and working through debugging and addressing the issues to get faster at it.
Successes
This was my first Park activation, so I was happy just to get the 10 QSOs. However, I set out with the intention of activating the park “data only” for fun since I’ve been working on FT8 so much recently. I’d expect that activating a part on FT8 is usually very simple and easy, but the extra challenge of artificially limiting myself to 10 watts and preferring to get contacts with new stations made this activation a little more interesting.