[Phillip Beall]

All,

On Friday, September 19, Mark Johnson (W5PTX) and I went to Lake Bob Sandlin State Park (link) for a Parks On The Air (POTA) weekend.  The Texas QSO Party (link) was 0900-2100 Saturday and 0900-1500 on Sunday.

We each rented a “cabin”, which is a concrete floor, four walls and a roof with outlets and a window unit.  In a word – spartan.  The bathroom facilities were across the street, so it is more like a fancy camping setup with a rigid tent.  Having said that, I might – might – rent a spare one in the future and we could use it for our ham shack.  In this exercise Mark brought a little popup shelter that we used for a ham shack.  It did a pretty good job of allowing the breeze to pass through while reducing the insects.  I am not going to lie to you, it was warm at times when the breeze wasn’t blowing, but there was a breeze most of the time and we had a great time.

The rig was a computer controlled ICOM 7300 using Win4IcomSuite for Icom Radios software (link) to operate the radio.  We used N3FJP contesting software (link) to log the contacts.  Mark had an addon monitor attached to his laptop which basically doubled the available screen area.  After watching him operate I think that is a must have actually.  And the radio itself was connected to an end-fed wire suspended over a couple of tree limbs.  It just could not have been simpler.  To facilitate the real-time look up of call signs I used a Franklin Wireless JEXtream RG2100 (T-Mobile) 5G WiFi 6 Mobile Hotspot Router which I bought through TechSoup last year (2024).  That same exact router can frequently be bought “open box” for well less than $100 on eBay, which beats the current TechSoup price.  Make sure you buy from a reputable seller as you want to make sure they will take it back if it will not activate for any reason.  In any case, if you want to buy one of them and get it on the plan offered to the Club via Mobile Beacon, please contact me and I will explain how that can be done.  In our exercise I set it up in the window of my cabin and pointed at Mark’s cabin where we had max bars and a 5G connection.  So, out pretty much in the boondocks, but with a cell tower visible at night directly opposite us on the other side of the lake; we had a 5G connection and streamed ballgames and all kinds of stuff.  LOL  Also as an aside, I set up a WiFi camera in my cabin and with motion activation enabled while I was not physically there, I had fantastic security coverage for my gear.  Kathy even kept an eye on it when I was over playing ham radio with Mark.

We finished with 211 contacts for the POTA weekend.  Of those, 125 were SSB contacts for the TX QSO Party and worth 16,750 points.  Mark is being generous with the “we” part.  He operated and I took notes of call signs and looked them up in QRZ to make sure his log was right.  There was the occasional error, such as when we each copied different states (North versus South Carolina), so I think it was helpful to have two sets of ears.

Here is a link to a kind of rudimentary map of the contacts (link).  No cool lines like we have seen on some other mapping products, but a nice graphical display of where all we contacted.  And here is a link to another source (link).  It is a little more graphically appealing, but it is also missing some of the contacts.  In any case, outside of North America we hit a bunch of places – Cuba, Spain, Slovakia, to name a few.  We even made two phone contacts in Russia!

If you ever get the chance to do one of these I encourage you to do it.  Playing wingman is a great way to learn techniques that will ease your doing one yourself sometime.  I took a ton of pictures so rather than try and tease them into the write up I will just post them below.

73

Phillip Beall (W5EBC)

 

 

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