I took an impromptu daytrip to Tunbridge Wells yesterday with Marnie as it was our day together and I had a train ticket on my flexipass to use up and no other plans. Lovely weather. We basically just used it as an excuse to get out of the house, go for a train ride (Marnie loves a train ride) and an opportunity for a picnic in a park and an explore of a new one we'd not been to before.
Daddy also used it as an opportunity to play radio, because of course.
I had seen that Tunbridge Wells has two 'parks' which qualify for the amateur radio game/contest Parks On The Air (POTA) which I've written about here previously. Basically it's where you go to a location and try and make contacts with other amateur radio users in order to 'activate' that location. It aims to get you up off your arse and out to visit new places with a goal in mind.
I chose Dunorlan Park partly as the topography showed me that it is a relatively high point near Tunbridge Wells, as well as looking rather nice and having some interesting features like a chalybeate spring.
Well I won't draw this out: I tried and failed to get even a single contact. Added my spot to the POTA website. But doing POTA (as opposed to SOTA, from hill or mountain summits) with a handheld on the 2 metre band is just... Probably not worth doing. There's just not enough people in the vicinity, monitoring on a random afternoon who want to take part. So it is I think my second or third failed activation attempt. But I'll keep trying. And I hope to do a summit one day instead, where the elevation should give me much broader reach even just with my humble handy.
Two contacts of note though: I was monitoring several frequencies in the lead-up to my activation attempt, and I heard someone on the VHF/2m calling frequency of 145.500MHz. I responded, having only heard the tail-end of their call, and they politely responded that they'd just called for their buddy and were about to get out of their vehicle and wished me a good day. Unremarkable, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard someone on one of the calling frequencies in all the time my radio's been quietly scanning away.
And although I didn't make a single simplex (e.g. direct, walkie-talkie style) contact from Dunorlan Park, I did find I could reach one of the Hastings repeaters, GB3ES, and Ricky M7RKR who I've spoken to before kindly gave me a decent reception report.
It's not that far from Tunbridge Wells to Hastings, but it's a novelty hitting the repeater from that distance as I'm normally basically sat underneath it when operating from my QTH (home).
The slightly confusing bit of having a repeater on the coast like at Hastings is that its potential reach - at least on land, under normal conditions - is sliced in half, so a range up as far north to Tunbridge Wells is to be expected. And on another landlocked repeater somewhere else, you'd naturally expect a repeater to reach that far in all directions, topography permitting.
Speaking of which... Dunorlan Park to GB3ES - how far is that, and what's the topography like anyway? Using the catchily titled UK Radio Line of Sight Surface Elevation Profile Generator I can see that there's a good few lumps in the way over that 36k distance.
I don't actually know where GB3ES is located precisely, so I've charitably selected one of the highest points in Hastings for the profile generator, which may give it even more prominence than it actually has.
So yes: I had heard folks accessing the repeater from Tunbridge Wells before, hence why I thought to give it a go. But the simple joy in squeezing the button on my small, cheap Quansheng handheld transceiver and making contact over that distance is just a little slice of radio magic that I take a lot of joy from.
And just in case you think Marnie was probably sick of daddy playing radio all this time, she was having a great time climbing her buggy and crawling about on the grass. And besides, I did take her to see a chalybeate spring afterwards as a treat.
