Ham Radio Hodge Podge – A Week’s Worth Of RF Obsession

Look carefully at that radio in the picture above? Recognize it? I’ll come back to it at the end of this post.

The odd places radio takes you. Below is Pocumtuck Rock in Deerfield MA. It is the same place the picture above was taken. The WGAF-FM tower sits above the Eaglebrook Boarding School. It was a long drive from Boston, but an easy climb worth a single SOTA point.

This is my station, running to a vertically hung 10M double bazooka antenna. Have you figured out what the radio is yet? We’ll come back to it…it’s just a teaser for now.

I had to use AA1F’s station, the Yaesu FT-891A, LDG-Z100Plus tuner, and 20M Radiowavz EFHW antenna to get my four necessary contacts. My own novel station was a bust.

On the way down the trail, we paused for a picture of the chairlift, a perk for the boarding middle schoolers. The setting sun derailed our desire to go activate another summit.

I arrived home to find this beauty on my doorstep — a variable capacitor capable of up to 365pF of capacitance. There is a rift occurring in my mind. Something experimental, experiential, and creative. Perhaps a little bit desperate. It is no longer purely satisfying to simply use a radio. Harnessing RF, like a masterful impressionist dragging their bristles through paint to approximate a perfect sky, is becoming an obsession.

I build a simple circuit, but I do not have the right components. One electrolytic is too big and the other is too small. I don’t have the right transistor so I pick one that might do the trick. I do not have enough experience or knowledge to know if these changes will work. But I try them anyway. It’s a guitar pedal called “Fuzz Face” by the way.

It doesn’t work. At least not as a guitar pedal. Garbled voices are now coming out of the guitar’s amplifier and AA1F and I wonder if they are ghosts. Turning the audio potentiometer makes the voices clearer and we can now hear the obvious hispanic broadcast station. I guess I built my first working receiver… I don’t think AA1F was impressed though.

I snuck off for a solo POTA activation at Watson Pond State Park in Taunton MA.

The gates to the park were closed, so I walked in from a public boat ramp down the street. I essentially had the place to myself and commandeered this pavilion for my activation.

The radio du jour was the Icom IC-705 with an RM Italy MLA100 100W amplifier. Both the amp and the radio were running off of Bioenno 15ah LiFePO4 batteries. And of course, the LDG Z100Plus tuner for the 40M off-center fed dipole antenna.

Nellie kept me company for the 99 contacts on 20M and 40M.

Hey, c’mon, it’s not like anyone was around to take this picture for me, ya know?

Then a radio repair. This is the inside of the faceplate of AA1F’s Yaesu FT-891. The RF/AF knob was loose. Turns out that you just need to pull off the knobs on the front side to tighten it. Still really neat to see the innards of this rig…

We are off again on a SOTA twofer. If you look carefully you can see my diy 2M/70cm slim jim antenna (here and here) far above AA1F’s head. It’s easiest to see the coil of coax, but you can also make out some window line. We are on Peak Mountain in Granby Ct. AA1F is posing by my station after his 20M activation.

And I am finishing my activation on 20M. I only managed to snag two 2M qsos and needed to finish up on HF for the four contacts needed for the SOTA point.

Talcott Mountain in Simsbury CT was our next stop. There is a 1.25 mile trail that leads to Hublein Tower, once a private estate and now a museum, at the high point of Talcott.

Some kids were excited to manage to start a little fire on the rocks of the overlook. They went so far as to cook hotdogs over it. Probably neither safe nor legal, their spirit was in the right place. And they did not manage to burn the mountain down.

I set up shop in this pavilion.

Another 2M activation with the Yaesu FT-4X handitalkie.

I just hung the slim jim up on a post. I managed to get the four contacts I needed on 146.52 this time.

AA1F was far away on a picnic table.

He activated as both a POTA and SOTA and made a few dozen contacts.

Oh yeah, and the mystery radio that I was talking about earlier? The one from Pocumtuck Rock? It’s a Uniden Bearcat 880. Yup, its a citizen’s band rig. I am hoping to do a complete CB POTA. No, it doesn’t count as an official POTA. But you are missing the point if you think that is no reason to do it…

The world of radio is a journey. An adventure. It takes me places I would never go. Opens my world to nooks and crannies that I would have overlooked. Hyperlocal travel. And the transcendence of time and space. There is a deep satisfaction in the moment the crackle of static turns into tones of a human voice. A sense of relief. A moment of awe and wonder. You called out into the aether and someone came back to you. You are not alone. Not forgotten. “You are five nine here in Kansas” is the equivalent of hearing “you are still wonderfully alive my friend, and so am I.” This fleeting contact is all that’s needed to remind each another we still exist.

You are five nine my friend. I have not forgotten about you either.

Always,
KM1NDY