Preparation:

As my wife had a doctor’s appointment where I needed to drop her off and pick her up, this gave me a chance to activate this POTA park, which I had tried before; however, hardware failure meant that it was a wasted trip.

Hopefully, this would be a more successful attempt.

All equipment was still in the bag that I took to Cyprus and could be put into the car before we left home, along with the three magnet antenna base (but not the HF-PRO2 antenna) on the roof. This was planned to minimise the set-up time that I would need once I arrived.

The terrestrial weather looked like being nice, and the radio weather also appeared to be improving.

The Activation

POTA DE-0591

I’m glad to say that the drive was uneventful and the weather stayed nice (see photos). I had decided, as this was around lunch time, to start on 40 metres, expecting to get the needed 10 contacts for qualification, in no time at all. I was to be surprised. The 40 metre band was horribly noisy, sounding almost like truck ignition noise across the band (this, I later found, was noise from the Ionosphere). It took 10 minutes to get 4 contacts, which isn’t too bad, but then, no matter how long I called, I was not getting any more responses. I thought that switching to 20 metres was unlikely to bring more contacts as lunchtime is a bad time for 20 metres usually; however, as the only other POTA activators out at the time were on 20 metres, I decided to change bands. Again, the band was noisy (but not as bad as 40m) and suffering from deep QSB. Some stations that I normally get at S9 were down around S3, so conditions were difficult. I was actually called by two SOTA activations and managed also two Park-to-Park contacts, so that in the end I had 13 contacts as my time ran out. This was another park added to my activated list. I’m now running out of parks that I have not yet activated in the imediate area.

I packed up and headed back to pick up my wife from the doctor’s practice.

All in all, it was a good short activation, but it underlined to me that even when the atmospheric readings suggest the bands should be good, there’s nothing like getting out and on the air to find how the bands really are. The following day, I heard that 20 metres had been open to DX a couple of hours before I was on and also a couple of hours afterwards, so it’s just the “luck of the draw” whether radio conditions are on your side or not.

Now that the weather is improving, I hope my next activation may be a summit, GMA, HEMA or SOTA, at least somewhere where I can get back to using horizontal wire antennas on a mast.

Photos:

Equipment taken:

• Xiegu G-90 radio.
• Komunica Power HF-PRO2-PLUS-T loaded vertical antenna.
• Three–magnet car roof antenna mount.
• 2 x 4 Ah LifePO4 battery.
• Super small headphones.
• Smartphone for spotting.

Log:

POTA DE-0591

Conclusions:

The grab-and-go equipment bag makes these quick activations easy, but as always, what decides whether an activation is successful or not is less the equipment and more the radio conditions.

73 ’til the next activation!