Whilst looking over the POTA map of parks, I noticed a relatively new park – it had only been in the scheme for about 8 months and as such had only been activated twice – so I put it on my TODO list to get to as soon as I had a spare couple of hours. By time I got up there another activator had made it 3 total activations.
At first impressions the park seemed a little odd, and reading online I find that it’s build on the site of a former power station. It’s not a large park, at only 18 hectares but it has easy pedestrian access and a small car park. It’s also near the site of several ship wrecks (shown in the featured image at the top of this page). Sadly the shipwrecks are a few hundred meters outside of the park, so I couldn’t do my activation up there – although that would have been a very cool spot.
When I arrived, a storm seemed to be rolling in. The winds were very high and there was a light but persistent rain. Since I’m usually a SOTA activator spending half of my activations battling the weather, I took the rare opportunity to activate from the vehicle.
The photo here shows my initial setup, from the edge of the carpark with my antenna set up next to the vehicle. This was a “late shift” activation so the park was quiet, but I was still conscious to make sure my activation was out of the way as best as I could.
This was my first activation from inside the vehicle, so I didn’t really have my setup dialed in at this point, and simply sat my FT-857D on the passenger seat and got to transmitting. In the future I’d like to work on this configuration so that things are a little more comfortable, and so I can more easily activate with a mix of SSB and data.
FT8 makes things easy though, so I grabbed the required 10 contacts in about 40 minutes, got two more just to make sure, and hit the road again.
Failures
I think in the future, if I’m going to do the occasional POTA activation, I’m going to need to work on a decent HF setup for the truck. I’ve got a decent VHF/UHF capability thanks to the fitted FTM-300D, but I’ll need to look at HF antenna options. I’d love to get something like the ATAS-120A for flexibility and simplicity.
Successes
My SOTA setup with the MC-750 and FT-857D is pretty solid, so whilst running it from the driver’s seat of the truck was a little unusual, the flexibility that it offers is fantastic. The FT-857D although heavy, offers all-band and all mode capability, so this activation was pretty simple.