Preparation:

As you will see from the title, this was to be a car based activation, not the “true portable” ones that I have been doing lately to test out the equipment for my 5B (Cyprus) trip. This was a fill-in activation of a park which I had not, to date, activated and also two trails, which I had. The equipment would be the 20-Watt Xiegu G90 on the back seat of the car and the Komunica Power HF-PRO2-PLUS-T loaded vertical whip on a three magnet mount on the car roof.

As it turned out, the spot I chose had limited space with cars parked at an angle to the side of the busy road, so this configuration would be the only practical one in this location.

While my wife attendedd the Franz Marc museum in Kochel, I would drive about 20 minutes further south to the point where these three POTA entities overlap.

The car was packed the previous day to minimise time needed on-site to set-up.

The Activation

POTA DE-0981 / DE-0966 / DE-0594

After dropping off my wife at the museum, I continued down the road to the parking spot, which was very full, however on my second attempt, I found a free spot, parked up and set-up. With temps over 30°C, I opened all of the car’s windows but even with those open, there was very little wind and longer than the hour that I was there would have become difficult. This was approaching midday, so I did not expect any DX but decided to start on 20m SSB in any case as I could see some POTA activators spotted there. Firstly I looked around for strong stations, just to get into the log, then chased park-to-park contacts and finally found a free spot, spotted myself and called CQ. The QSB on the band was difficult but what was different today, was that some of the stations sounded to have corrupted audio. When you hear one station like this, you put it down to a problem with that stations radio, however I heard 4 or 5 of these and I wonder if this was in some way an effect from the partial (90%) solar eclipse that we had at sunset the previous day?

One surprise “out of nowhere” was Peter K2UPD from Lexington New York, calling me, as he does from time to time – he must have a GREAT station in a very quiet location!

More than enough contacts to qualify were obtained and so rather than switch to 40 metres, I decided to pack up and head back to pick up my wife, who was already waiting in the sun 15 minutes before our agreed time. All in all, it’s good to find that the old PLOTA configuration of the loaded vertical with the G90 radio, still works fine.

Photos: