The past couple of months have not been very radioactive. The weather in the Pacific Northwest has been … unusual this winter. We had an unseasonably dry and warm early winter followed by a vicious cold snap and a heck of a snow storm making getting outside difficult. However, this week the temperatures rose into the mid 60’s. With this thaw, I took the opportunity to get out in the woods and do some adventuring.
Since I began doing radio, I’ve had this notion that it would be fun to activate from several of our local ski shelters. The local ski club maintains several warming shelters on the Deschutes National Forest (POTA Entity K-4378) about 15 miles west of Bend. Some are accessible via groomed trails, others require more rigorous “off-track” approaches.
This past Monday, January 28, 20204, with temps in the mid 60’s in town and mid 50’s up at the snow parks, I decided to ski out to the Nordeen Shelter from the Swampy Lakes Sno-Park Trailhead. The first 1/2 mile of the route follows the groomed Tangent Loop, but then it’s off into the soft snow. The Nordeen Loop itself is 3.75 miles. I choose to take the shorter 1.75 mile Northern route on the way out thinking it would be a bit quicker and I would have more time to activate before skiing back to the van.
There was a track from previous skiers but the warmth of the sun combined with rain from the previous couple of days made for a slow ski. I would be gliding along fine then hit a soft spot in the sun and my skis would punch through the track, or slide off into the softer snow. I made it to the shelter in about 40 mins, had a snack and setup the KX2, a recent purchase I made in preparation for an upcoming trip to the Dolomite region of Italy.
I’ve not used the KX2 many times and am still learning the ins and outs. This day was my most successful outing with the radio. I also brought the AX1 vertical to play with since my first activation with it was a fail due to my misunderstanding that the radio was in cw practice mode and not transmitting at all.
The radio was already tuned to the 17m band from an activation of K-9990 the previous Saturday morning so I found and open frequency and called CQ POTA. It took a few minutes for the chasers to start calling back. After a half dozen contacts, I switched to 20m and was able to hear into the mid-west and east coast all the way down to Florida. After about 40 minutes I called QRT, packed up my rig and put my skis back on.
I took the southern route back to the van. It is a slightly longer track but with fewer elevation changes so its mostly an uphill slog. I had plenty of time to think as I shuffled along and decided it would be a fun challenge to attempt activating all of the ski shelters on the map above before the end of the ski season. I’ll post again when I get the next one done.
W7MTB: Amateur Radio Notes 