Full credit goes to Mike VE7KPZ for planning a POTA activation during a major HF contest weekend - newbie mistake! Next time we will check the http://www.arrl.org/contest-calendar well ahead of time.
It all started with the random plan to head out to Kalamalka Lake Provincial Park to do a POTA activation following the NORAC Saturday morning breakfast meet-up. We would setup Mike's Wolf River Coils TIA vertical antenna, Yaesu FT-891 and power it all from his DIY LiFePO4 battery pack.
Along for the fun were David VA7SZ, Jane VE7WWJ and Mike VE7KPZ. We didn't get too many other takers as it was still a brisk -3C in the sun with snow covered ground.
Once we reached Rattlesnake Point, Jane and Mike started to setup the TIA and David got to work on setting up a new home-brew 20m delta loop suspended by a 20' super-light fishing pole he recently found for an incredible price at Surplus Herbie's.
The location was a little tough for the TIA as it does not like any down-slope in it's radials... so the best we could get was a 2:1 VSWR on 20m. David, on the other hand, got a great tune on the delta loop (without any tuner in-line) with 1.4:1 for 20m and 1.3:1 on 10m.
With Jane's help, the TIA won the antenna setup contest and Mike started with a look at the 20m band... and it was FULL! Not one spot to start calling CQ POTA.
Eventually we found a quiet frequency high up in the band (with the help of Murray VE7MH on the phone to David), but nobody appeared to be listening for POTA. Of course it might have helped if someone had spotted us or posted up on the Facebook POTA group. David then suggested we take a listen to some of the other stations and we immediately discovered that there was a contest going on - the ARRL DX contest.
So out the window went the POTA activation, and now we were in contest mode. As the band was so full, we'd need to hunt and pounce today.
With the VSWR on the TIA a little high, we switched to the delta loop to give it a try - wow, what an antenna!
We proceeded to make various contacts to distant places such as Alaska, Guam, Bermuda, Japan and Russia. Some stations were kilowatters, but some were just running between 10 and 100 watts like us. Signals were good and noise very low - good times on HF.
We hunted and pounced for about 2 hours and then decided to pack it up with 10 DX contacts made.
Technical aside: over the 2 hours on site, it was amazing to see only 2.691Ah of battery capacity (of approx 9Ah usable) used, with a peak draw of 13.62A running 100 watts for SSB phone. Most of the time we were listening, hunting for the next caller and then attempting to break into each pile-up. The 10Ah nominal DIY LiFePO4 battery pack appears to be perfect for these types of endeavours in the future.
It was fun,
73,
Mike VE7KPZ with Jane VE7WWJ and David VA7SZ
Pictures courtesy of Jane VE7WWJ.