Friday, May 05, 2006

 
Thursdays are self-declared "QRP in the Park" days around here.

I had some very painful surgery earlier this year and since I spent a lot of the recovery time learning Morse code and reading the ARRL's QRP book, I bought myself a Yaesu FT-817ND as a "get well" present.

So pretty much every Thursday when work and weather cooperate, Craig (AE6RR) and I head to Murphy park in Sunnyvale for some QRP in the sunshine.

This morning I heard K6OTT on the 9am Talk Net announce that he was going "LunchPacking" I quickly chimed in with a "me too."

I arrived at Murphy park about 12:10. Joanne, KG6TJJ, was already there. She had heard the comments on the 9am Talk Net and was curious about portable operation and how to run a FT-817.

I quickly set-up, demonstrating equipment and explaining things between bites of sandwich.

There was a choice of antennas. I had both a Pac-12 and an end fed 1/2 wave wire & counterpoise for 40m with me. Running a bit late, as usual, I felt the wire would go up faster.

Luck was with me. The first try using the "water bottle sling" launching method went over the desired tree branch, 25-30' up. That put the antenna in an inverted-U. Figuring that "the more wire, the higher, the better" and my luck was holding, I made another successful launch and had the entire inverted L 20-30' up.

The set-up was a FT-817ND, a EM-2 tuner and a 7 A-hr gel cell for power. I used the stock mic and an Astatic for SSB and PalmPaddles for CW.

The bands weren't in really good shape. The first thing we did was make sure we got a contact with Andreas, K6OTT. We really had to pull him out of the noise. Since it was Joanne's first 20m contact she was tickled pink. She was very glad it was you and on equipment like she had at home. Andreas had helped her out with her equipment so it was a triple win!

Since Joanne was newer than I, I gave her a bit of a guided tour of 20m. We had solid copy on the maritime net and county hunters, but didn't hear the
DX net or the SSTV guys. Weird!

Once I determined that 20m wasn't going to happen, I went down to 40m and
checked into the noon-time net. I got a resigned tone from the net
control when checking in QRP... The signal _is_ pretty hard to copy in
Reno... :-(

We dropped back to 20m just in time to hear Andreas calling CQ on CW. He was doing 599 where we were. It was a REALLY nice demonstration of the difference between CW and SSB for Joanne.

Three contacts, weird bands, learning experiences, great weather.

What more can you ask? (More contacts perhaps?)

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