The feed of updates to Paul Butzi
Stillwater State Wildlife Area is just a few miles from my home as the crow flies, and only a 15 minute drive. My history with the Wildlife Area spans two and a half decades - I have for many many years walked our dogs there, and the Snoqualmie Valley Trail (on which I have done many thousands of miles of runs) runs directly along the northern edge of the area. On top of that, I am rapidly closing…
As I’ve progressed down my portable operating journey, my portable operating has become more and more CW centric, which has put a certain focus on finding portable paddles I like. Two recent acquisitions have been the Bamatech TP-III and the Modern Morse Nameless paddles. Both have sterling reputations amongst the POTA CW activator set. Modern Morse Nameless Bamatech TP-III Length (mm) 83 73 Width…
Parks on the Air is the gateway drug to amateur radio field operating. Oh, I know, the traditional thought is that Field Day is the thing that gets hams out into the field and out of their shack in the basement/garage/spare bedroom. That’s bullshit. Right now, Parks on the Air (aka POTA ) is where field operating is at. POTA is bigger than all the other field operation programs, combined. SOTA ,…
For a while US-3216 was the closest POTA park to my home, and I’ve activated it more than two dozen times, earning a Kilo award in the process. It’s a large park (531 acres) with amenities for swimming, picnicking, with soccer fields and baseball diamonds. I’ve activated from many different locations in the park, and my preferred spot depends on weather, time of the year, and how crowded the park…
Power for portable radio operating can come from a variety of sources, in a wide variety of power levels and overall capacity. What solutions you find appropriate is largely dependent on what I’ll call your power budget , and your power budget is in turn determined by the equipment you plan to use, how you plan to use it, and how long your operating period will be. Your power budget consists of…
As I’ve expanded my field operating experience, I’ve acquired a number of items which, while not strictly radio related, are nevertheless great additions to my POTA activation activities. Chairs Long ago, I bought a TravelChair Joey Chair to use for portable operating. It’s a good example of a field chair which superficially looks like a great solution but is not quite right. The difficulties with…
Two of the essentials for portable operating (well, actually, for any operating, but…) are an antenna to radiate your signal and capture signals you want to receive, and feedline to get signals between your transceiver and the antenna. The difference between portable operating and your home station are generally going to be that you need to be able to carry the antenna and feedline to and from the…
In the POTA Discord, Charlie N4IIT asked A bit off topic, but I’d love to hear more about how you think about the QRP skill set. I hear this a lot but I’m not 100% sure what folks mean. I want to understand, though, because I want to be a better QRP operator! This is a truly excellent question, and I’ve taken my answer and fleshed it out a bit here. The basis of what I think of as the QRP skill…
Now that I have my new Yaesu FT-891 mostly sorted, I’ve been putting together a POTA/field kit, roughly based on the field kit I had put together for the Xiegu G90 , which is now, to use the currently fashionable phrase, deprecated . In fact, the kit is going into the same LowePro camera bag I was using for the Xeigu G90 , into which it fits pretty brilliantly. In the kit Contents of the kit:…
My recent purchased Yaesu FT-891 came, as all spanking new Yaesu FT-891’s do, with a four contact Molex style power connector, the male side of the connector pair connected to a pointlessly long 12 AWG power cord fitted with fuses in both the positive and negative leads, and the female half of the connector pair is set in the rear bulkhead of the radio. I have opined in the past about how…
POTA activations and the Politics of Power It’s worth a little thinking about how boosting your transmit power affects a POTA activation. The generally unobserved and uncommented fact about POTA activations is that the activator is almost always running lower power and an antenna/antenna deployment which is lower performance than the hunter, and very often radios where absolute performance has…
Eager to get my ‘ parks activated’ count up to 30 for the next arbitrary award level on the POTA website, I headed up to Larrabee SP , the first state park in the state. It’s about an hour and 50 minute drive for me, one way, from my home - not close but not far, either. Larrabee SP is a surprisingly large park, nestled up against Puget Sound on the west side, and to the east pretty far up to the…
On 12/15, decent weather tempted me out to try for two activations - Lake Sammamish SP (US-3216), followed by Palouse to Cascades Trail (US-3203). One activation was straightforward, and the other one was a bit bumpy. Lake Sammamish Setup Once again, I set up in the picnic shelter near the playground. It’s a lovely spot but I set the antenna up in a spot where from my operating position, it was…
Looking at my stats on the POTA website, I saw that I need three new activations to hit the next level of activator award. I am fairly resolved to try to hit that before the end of the year, so I reasoned that I could perhaps tag both Kanaskat Palmer State Park and Flaming Geyser State Park in one day, and I headed out to do just that. Both parks are hobbled by a lack of cell service, so I took…
As the weather turns less pleasant, my willingness to activate new parks diminishes, because I often have very little idea if I will be able to find shelter from the rain. At Lake Sammamish, I know there are three picnic shelters, and it’s very unlikely they will be in use when I show up on a rainy day. It doesn’t hurt that Lake Sammamish SP is in second place in terms of travel time for me…
After our Big Windstorm, I had tried to do an activation of Lake Sammamish State Park and arrived at the park to find, to my horror, all the gates locked. There was so much damage at the park, they’d closed the park while they dealt with the huge amount of tree damage. So I felt a little anxiety as I headed to Lake Sammamish SP again to try for an activation. Fortunately this time the park was…
Having narrowly avoided a ‘ invalid’ activation attempt at Lake Sammamish SP when I inadvertently had a QSO fall into a new UTC day, I was feeling a need to redeem my failed activation at Marckworth SF which is just a short distance from my home, by getting a valid activation there. Cell service is spotty in the area of Marckworth SF that’s easiest to access from my home. That’s kept me from…
A week of looking around for another set of parks that would give me an opportunity to do two parks in one day left me at the end of the week having done no activations and with no real plan. It didn’t help that the weather was uniformly lousy all week. But I was resolved to fit an activation into the week and so with a Friday clear of obligations, I headed off to my reliable standard, Lake…
I made my very first POTA QSO on October 4, 2023. I did my first POTA park activation on October 30, 2023. Prompted by a desire to hunt (and then activate) using CW , I made my first POTA CW QSO on November 30, 2023. So I am a little over a year of POTA in the hunter role, just a smidgen past a year as an activator, and not quite a year playing POTA using CW . It seems a good time to look back…
With the itch to get out and do an activation growing, and a Friday with no commitments scheduled, I started eyeing the POTA map looking for promising opportunities that might require only a modest drive. Having had a great deal of fun activating two parks on Camano Island, my attention fell on two parks not far from there - Bayview State Park (US-3157) and Blanchard State Forest (US-5566), both…
One of my goals is to activate more different parks. I’ve been eyeing the cluster of parks on Whidbey Island for some time, contemplating a two day POTA excursion to activate all of them. Looking at those parks brought the two parks on Camano Island into my field of attention - Cama Beach State Park (US-3168) and Camano Island State Park (US-3169) The parks are about a 5 minute drive apart from…
I’m an inveterate optimizer. I’m not suggesting that I optimize for what other people expect - in fact, often the opposite. But it’s a peculiar habit of mine to do something, and afterwards take a moment or two to ponder how I could make whatever it was better. If it’s some drudgery task, perhaps I want to get it done more quickly, or with a better result. If it’s some recreational activity I’m…
As we head deeper into autumn here in the PNW the weather can only get colder and rainier until spring. If I want to keep doing activations, I need to work out how to do an activation on a rainy day. My plan is to learn how to do that by doing it. So on 10/17/2024 I headed to the park, knowing in advance I was going to get rained on. Some parks will obviously be easier than others - parks with…
On Oct 14, I was champing at the bit to do an activation, despite a sort of wet weather forecast. Figuring I’d start figuring out how to work in lousy weather, I ignored the forecast and headed to Lake Sammamish State park. Setup I arrived at 10:20 or so to find a fairly sunny, partly cloudy prospect, so I picked this visit as a chance to try a different spot, and headed for a picnic table right…
Despite the dour outlook of various propagation prediction tools and reports of cruddy band conditions I was eager to get back to doing activations after my long hiatus while we traveled in Egypt and Jordan. So with some angst about how things would go I loaded up the G90 kit and the KX2 kit into the car, and headed to Lake Sammamish State Park. The weather forecast was for solid overcast but as I…
Presented with the possibility of a clear schedule in the afternoon I cleverly packed the day’s vital tasks into the AM with a goal of sloping off for a very relaxed afternoon enjoying the beautiful weather (clear skies, temps in the low 80’s F, and a gentle breeze) doing a somewhat more relaxed activation at some park to be chosen as I got in the car. I piled the freshly charged KX2 , the…
My recent struggles during POTA activations have had me thinking hard about QRP , activations, and antennas, specifically antennas for POTA park activations. I suppose you could generalize that to field operating, but as I’ll explain, POTA makes for a somewhat special case. Beyond that, my particular situation (being located in the Pacific Northwest) seems to make a special case. Origin Story I’ve…
The weather has been wonderful and with pleasant temps and a day free I resolved to head out for a POTA activation or two. Propagation forecasts were not particularly favorable, but my feeling is that I should just head out and see what happens. After some consideration I resolved to activate Olallie State Park, a little under an hour’s drive away. I’d breezed through the park on the way home from…
Propagation conditions continue to be crummy but I am resolved to continue to do activations anyway. I am not using the ‘ number of QSOs’ metric, I am working from the reading of the Fun-O-Meter tm . Since weather here in Carnation was crummy, I figured I’d branch out and hit a park part way over the mountains, and I settled on Lake Easton State Park (US-3214) My goal was to get a valid activation…
Notwithstanding crappy band condx, today was POTA day. Off I trundled to Lake Sammamish State Park, US-3216. I had a cunning plan: do enough (ten) SSB QSOs to validate the activation and then switch to CW . SSB Setting up the G90 outputting 20W into the Chelegance MC-750 on 20m, it took five minutes from spotting myself to the first bite, and then over the next half hour I had another 12 contacts,…
Today I did a very exciting (well, exciting to me ) POTA activation at Lake Sammamish State Park (US-3216). This activation was exciting for several reasons: I did not set up a station in the back seat of the car, and work from the car, but instead set up on a picnic table. For the first time, I used the Chelegance MC-750 antenna for an activation, along with a new ABR coax with protective…