Now that my license has come through, I was looking to get out and start using the FT-818 for what I bought it for – QRP work.
Looking at the various offerings for QRP, there’s a little bit more available compared to what was on offer last time, SOTA, POTA, WWFF, just to name a few, picking one activity to work was going to take a bit of time. While I had originally intended to work the SOTA program, a listen around showed pretty quickly that the WWFF program seems to be the one that’s favoured in VK at the moment, with plenty of hunters and activators alike, I’ve spent the majority of this week in my mornings before I start work (I work from home) doing some chasing and providing contacts for those out in parks or summits. It was a pretty easy decision to go with the WWFF program as this seemed to have the most activity – at least during the week.
So I looked at the WWFF map and chose a park that was easy to access nearby, and this morning I headed out to VKFF-2015 to activate the park and get some QSOs. I grabbed my EFHW40/20/10, 817, squid pole and handheld and headed out. Upon arriving at the park, I had to find a place to park and unfortuntely there’s not a lot of options at this park. At the northern end of the park there’s a short, steep track to a locked gate, and about half way long there’s a small dirt verge with again, a short steep track to the gate. Parking on the verge I grabbed the gear and set off into the park, in search of a comfortable spot to setup. I ended up following the sign to the “Yetholme Trig Track” and found the trig point on the top of the hill (Not a SOTA Summit unfortunately) and set up the antenna. I found a conveniently located pile of big rocks (I’m assuming they were dug out of the ground when the trig point was installed) that weren’t too uncomfy to sit on.
I plugged it in to the FT-818 and … dead silence.
I did an SWR check and everything seemed normal, so I tried self-spotting n the ParksNPeaks app but, it wouldn’t go through. I was getting spot notifications for others, but it seems I’m doing something wrong and unable to self-spot via the app. I tried the SMS option and bam, it came through. Calling on 7.144 for what seemed like an eternity (I think it was actually about ten minutes) and wondering if the lack of noise was the location or a fault, finally I had some contacts come in. The UTC day rolled over and a couple more returned to give me a second contact. After a little while longer calling I saw a spot come up for VK4FDJL on 15m in another park. Knowing the antenna doesn’t work too well on 15m I thought I’ll give it a try anyway, having worked Deryck yesterday on the same antenna on 15m yesterday from home. It took a couple of tries and some getting squashed by bigger hunters but eventually I think Deryck heard those magic works “Park To Park” and we got the contact in. Knowing the antenna didn’t work too well on 15, we exchanged pleasantries and I dropped down to 20m, worked a VK5 and a VK4, back to 40 for a couple more contacts then packed up and headed out.
All in all I spent about an hour in the park on air, made 17 contacts in total across two UTC days, my first successful VKFF Activation, my first ParkToPark, had a lot of fun and got in my exercise goal for the day (or so my watch tells me).
Lessons learnt:
1. Buy a voice keyer for the FT-818 (I actually have one on the way)
2. Expect to be calling for sometimes up to 10 minutes before contacts come in
3. Bring something soft to sit on
4. Bring water (I was only about 500m from the car in this case, but in hindsight this was an oversight and I’ll bring a drink bottle next time).
5. Next time i might have a play with antenna orientation, I might try setting it up as a horizontal or a sloper to see how that affects my ability to work stations. Everyone was at least 5/7 with most 5/9 or 5/9+, my average return report was about a 55.
6. Damn how I’ve missed doing this.
And now some photos:
