September 21, 2024
A couple of weeks ago Rose and I were up hiking on the Aberdeen Plateau off the CJ Express FSR. Some interestingly named mountain bike trails - Upper Medz, My Crowning Achievement and Tombstone - form a nice 9.5km loop over undulating terrain that includes great views of the Monashees and Kal Park, Vernon and Lavington. I had my Garmin GPS with me and noticed with interest that the Kal Park boundary actually includes the CJ Express FSR for about 1.5km.
Aha! Road accessible high elevation point - about as high as you can get in Kal Park at 1,298m. Great RF takeoff as it's a plateau. What's not to like for a POTA activation? About a week later I returned armed with my trusty Yaesu 891 (bomb proof and therefore weighs a ton), Lithium battery (another brick-like weight) and a set of EFHW antennas plus the David Skelhon un:un.
My set up is on the low budget side. My "launcher" system to get a thin cord up in a tree consists of a small bean bag filled with a fistfull of gravel which gets sent up with one of those doggie ball launcher thinggummies. The other end of the EFHW is held up with 3 or 4 4-foot long army surplus fibreglass tent poles . That lot gets held up with a single shock cord tied to one of the tie-down eyelets in the truck bed. Logging is a pen and paper, timekeeping is a Timex watch and I enter the QSO's manually into the POTA app. Well, it all works!
Band conditions on 20m were tricky with lots of QSB but I succeeded in activating with 16 QSO's in 45-50 minutes. All in the lower 48. Where are all the Canadian POTA hunters? Stations would appear and then fade out. So it made for snappy QSO's. There was a contest on and it caused some hilarity at one point as two pairs of stations ended up sharing exactly the same frequency at one point ... we had to sort out who was talking to whom as we all got a bit mixed up.
It was a great day to be out as a quick hike from the parking area where I ran my station brought me to great views of the valley below. And only one other vehicle parked up there - three young folks going off mountain biking.
Enjoy the attached photos. Contact me if you need the GPS coordinates of the activation point.
73 Ritchie va7rlx
The activation site:
And the patented antenna launch gizmo:
