Camping on John Flinchbaugh KD3EE

Camping and POTA

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

creek

pine grove setup

pine grove antenna

caledonia antenna

caledonia setup

caledonia inverted-v

POTA Weekend

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I used the EFHW for everything. I activated 4 park entities:

Caledonia State Park after riding the Michaux GRVL ride.
Michaux State Forest from the ATV trail parking on the ridge.
Kings Gap Environmental Education Center late in the day, so I raced a little.
- antenna up in about 8 minutes
- 10 contacts within 26 minutes
- on the road again 14 minutes later
Pine Grove Furnace the next morning, where I ran out of battery, so I did the whole thing with 1W FT8. I practiced a bit and started putting out my call on CW to see if RBN would pick me up, but kept it to a shy 1W. It didn’t pick me up.

ATV Trailhead

Michaux

Running Hot

Kings Gap Environmental Center

A wire deployed at Pine Grove Furnace

Key Secured

Camping, POTA, and Testing the EFHW

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 22:54:16 -0400

SPARC Elmer Night

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.

Memorial Day Weekend POTA US-4361, Kings Gap Environmental Center

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.