Last month my family took a long-awaited vacation to New Mexico. We had originally planned to take this trip, which consisted of visiting Carlsbad Caverns in southern New Mexico and then camping in northern New Mexico, in 2020. Due to several circumstances including COVID, the trip has been delayed until now.
After taking a couple of days to recuperate after LibertyFest events and a surgical procedure, we left home on Sunday, July 7th. Of course it was just our luck that we finished packing and left in the monsoon that happened that morning. I was so wet I had to change clothes before we could leave! It was about an 8-hour drive to Carlsbad, NM. After spending the night in a hotel, we headed about 20 minutes south to Carlsbad Caverns. It took most of the day to walk in the natural entrance all the way to the bottom and then walk all of the paths at the bottom. The kids had a blast!
We checked out of the hotel the next morning, Tuesday, July 9th, and we headed north to the mountains. Of course the route took us right through Roswell! We stopped in Roswell to do our grocery shopping for the camping trip. It was interesting to see aliens everywhere including in Walmart!
It took us about 5 hours in the car to make it to our campground. We stayed in the Agua Piedra national campground in the Carson National Forest. It is POTA (Parks on the Air) entity US-4513.
I am sure many of you are familiar with or have heard of Parks on the Air. For those of you who have not, Parks on the Air is a program for getting out into national and state parks (and other state and national entities) and making contacts with other stations. The activator, station in the park, makes contact with other stations commonly called hunters. There is no formal exchange which keeps the program flexible and adaptable. The most common exchange is signal report and state. Since there is no formal exchange hams have been known to work a contest from a park and they get POTA credit for it!
The program has been wonderful for ham radio. If you tune around the HF bands you will hear POTA stations all the time. This is especially true on weekends! The POTA website is https://pota.app and you can find all of the rules and documentation at https://docs.pota.app. You can also find all of the possible parks (BTW, there are a ton of them!) listed there as well.
Since we tent camp, the first order of business is always to start setting up the tent and get the kitchen set up so we can fix dinner. Of course right after these tasks are complete, the next agenda item is setting up the antenna and radio! I did manage to get my station set up and I was on the air that evening. My first contact was at 0303z on 7/10 so it wasn’t until after 9pm local (mountain) time but I did get on the air!
We camped for a total of 3 days and 4 nights. The highs were right at 80 degrees while the lows were close to 45 degrees. It was fantastic camping weather! The elevation at our campsite was 8500 feet which did not bother me most of the time but I had a few times I had some difficulty. There was one time I took a very quick break from the radio to move my solar panel and by the time I sat back down a minute later I was already out of breath!
It was beautiful in the mountains. Below are a couple of photos. You can click on them to enlarge them.
Now that I have shared some info about the camping trip, I would like to share some of the detail of my radio operations. I use a 12m (40ft) fiberglass mast with an end-fed half-wave dipole. This trip I took my Icom 746Pro instead of my Icom 706MKIIG that I use for most of my camping trips. The 746Pro has a much better receiver and I have plenty of battery power so I decided to give it a try this time. It worked really well!
I use 2 30Ah Eco-Worthy LiFePo4 (Lithium Iron Phosphate) batteries in parallel to give my 60Ah of battery capacity. I have a Harbor Freight 100w solar panel to keep the batteries charged. In full sun, it can charge at close to 6.5A so it really does not take long to top off the batteries. I am typically able to fully charge them by some time in the afternoon.
I either log with my iPad or my MacBook Pro laptop. The last few trips I have spent some time operating FT8 so more recently I have logged using my laptop. My logging software is a MacOS application called RumLogNG. The MacOS application is free while the iOS version of the application has a small fee. I have been using it for several years and I highly recommend it if you are using MacOS!
Now that you have read my descriptions, on to the photos!
Below you can see some details of my antenna and antenna installation. The exact installation location and direction depend entirely on the particular campsite. I need to keep the antenna within our campsite and set it up safely where it will not contact any power lines. That was not a problem here as there is no power anywhere near the campground! It also means the HF bands don’t have any local electrical noise which is always appreciated!
My typical setup consists of the radio, computer, headset and notepad. When operating POTA it is very common to get large pileups. The way I work a pileup is to type a callsign (or partial) into the logging software and then copy 1 or 2 additional partial callsigns. I will go back to the one I put in the logging software first and then go to the others afterwards. It really helps keep the pileup moving along!
One of the best ways to generate contacts quickly is to spot yourself on the POTA website when you start operating. Unfortunately that was not possible in this location as we had no data service on our phones. I had to find an open frequency, start calling CQ and wait for someone to find me. There were a couple of times it took a few minutes to make contact with someone who knew how to spot me on the page. Once I was spotted, though, the contacts usually came flooding in!
I ended up making the majority of my contacts on 20m. I did operate a little bit on 40m but propagation was just not great. I had a massive pipeline out to the west coast, though, and I did make a bunch of contacts. I ended up with a total of 456 valid (non-duplicate) contacts in my log. My busiest day was July 12th when I made 220 contacts! I made 411 of those on SSB and 45 on FT8.
Playing radio while camping is fun! I encourage any of you who camp or spend time in the state or national parks or just enjoy the outdoors to look into the Parks on the Air program. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!
73
Steven, N5ZQ
n5zq@n5zq.us
