A few weekends ago I got out on my first camping trip of the year, so of course the radio came along with too. This time I ended up at Fort Ridgely State Park in Minnesota at one of the walk-in campsites. They should really be called climb-in sites as the hill to get there is steep… but after getting all my gear up the scenery was completely worth it. I also like the relative privacy the walk-in sites have over the regular campsites. The weather was perfect the whole weekend, sunny and about 60s. No rain until the last night, and even then it wasn’t much.
As usual the rig was the Yaesu FT-857D with the Buddipole, and I brought my laptop and Signalink USB. I setup the Buddipole in the vertical configuration on 40 meters and instantly had responses from all over the United States with 20 watts. I stated on the air for almost an hour until my campfire became more interesting.
The next day I setup a horizontal dipole on 17 meters and did some FT8. I did have some success but it didn’t seem too many people were on the band. I got one voice contact in for a special event station, then switched to 20 meters on the vertical configuration. There were many stations participating in the New England QSO Party so I stayed on 20 meter voice for a bit. It was the most HF voice I’ve done in awhile and it was good to make as many contacts as I did considering the bands are “dead.” Of course there weren’t many contacts to be made outside of the QSO party but it was still fun.
I did discover however that the Yaesu MH-59A8J that I bought recently has the RF problem many have discovered. My outgoing audio on 17 meters was nothing but a buzz. Once I replaced it with the stock microphone that came with the rig I got through with no problem. I had no problem with that mic on 2 meters or 70 centimeters however. Looks like I have some troubleshooting to do here. The keypad is so convenient to type in an exact frequency instead of spinning dials forever, now it just needs to work as a microphone.
Once the sun started going down I set up the 40 meter vertical again. From there I operated 3 hours straight on FT8 and again worked all around the United States. Unfortunately I didn’t have any DX contacts this time around, but I still walked away with 62 contacts over the 2 days which is huge for me.
Not sure when I will get out next but hopefully soon.