I went camping and operated there and in Michaux Forest, Pine Grove Furnace, and Caledonia. I ran the 40M EFHW in trees at the parks as a sloper and inverted-V for 40M, 10M, and 15M. I did FT8 and a little CW.
At the campground, I contacted NY and ME on CW on 40M in the morning using the Gabil slider coil and whip. I discoverd that the my older Gabil antenna with jumpers on the coil has different thread size for the whip, so not interchangeable.
I used the EFHW for everything. I activated 4 park entities:
I spent the Elmer Night tuning EFHW again with the NanoVNA. I proved that I saw the same graph when the antenna was stretched shallow vs a higher inverted-V.
I tried folding back the EFHW wire. It changed the tuning slower than cutting the wire. DX Engineering has a video about this. I didn’t get it finished at the meeting, since because it got dark.
Matthew and I setup at Kings Gap Environmetal Center (US-4361) near the campground. I spent the most the time still slowly tuning my EFHW, and then dodging the rain. I barely made any contacts by the time I got the antenna in the air, and then the thunderstorms returned. We bailed, and I put the antenna up back at the campground strung over the site from tree to my fishing pole to telephone pole for the rest of the weekend. The twisted cords I’ve been using started unwinding, so it’s soon time to replace it with braided mason line.
