Blog Archive — Page 10

POTA Activation Report: Hengistbury Head

Written on Saturday 26 Oct 2024

After JOTA, where my son casually snagged his first transatlantic SSB contact, I decided to set myself a goal: by the end of the year, I was going to have my first transatlantic POTA park-to-park. Jim, N4JAW told me he thought it’d be easy, but I wasn’t entirely sure—he is...

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Jamboree on the Air 2024

Written on Saturday 19 Oct 2024

It’s been a year since my son, a young leader at the local Scout troop, helped with JOTA/JOTI and remarked that they were only really doing the “on the internet” side of it, not the “on the air” side. And that we should fix that. I didn’t have the Full...

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POTA/WWFF Activation Report: Upton Heath

Written on Sunday 13 Oct 2024

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by,It basically looped back on itself and it was quite muddy.Probably should have stuck with the road all those other folks took."—Robert Frost, POTA Activator (probably) It’s October, out on the heath. The days start cold now,...

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PAC-12 / JPC-12 Antenna Review

Written on Saturday 28 Sep 2024

Since I started doing POTA earlier this year, my go-to antenna has been a 20/40m dipole in an inverted-V configuration, the central pole being about 6m high. I like the simplicity and efficiency of a dipole, along with the knowledge that it was cut to the right resonant frequencies and...

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POTA/WWFF Activation Report: The New Forest

Written on Monday 26 Aug 2024

With an area of over 200 square miles, 175,000 permanent residents and over 15 million tourists a year, GB-0112: New Forest National Park feels like one of the cheaper POTA locations; much like the “Dorset National Landscape” which covers near half my county. Nevertheless, it’s one of the local spots...

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The Great Shack QRM Hunt (2024 Edition)

Written on Saturday 17 Aug 2024

A year or so ago, being unhappy with the large amount of noise I saw when playing radio from home (particularly on the 40-metre band), I went on a hunt for the causes. I turned off everything I could, bar the radio and its power supply, jumped around the band...

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POTA/WWFF Activation Report: Studland Heath

Written on Wednesday 14 Aug 2024

Despite living here on the Dorset coast all my life, when we pick a place to do this POTA nonsense and head out, I still get a bit of a rush when I think that all this beauty is just there, a few minutes down the road, for everyone to...

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A Combined ADS-B and AIS Map: The Hacky Way

Written on Monday 12 Aug 2024

The Online Amateur Radio Community runs an instance of tar1090 to aggregate ADS-B and MLAT data received by its members. While not strictly “amateur radio”, it’s adjacent enough that it generally sits in the area of ~50 contributors at any one time, and gives us pretty good coverage of most...

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POTA Activation Report: Old Harry Rocks

Written on Sunday 21 Jul 2024

It’s another weekend, and time for another Parks on the Air adventure. Not just any weekend in fact—it’s POTA’s Summer “Support your Parks” weekend, so there’s even a certificate in it for this one. Well, a downloadable PDF of a certificate, but still. It’s also part of the Worked all...

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POTA/WWFF Activation Report: Brownsea Island

Written on Sunday 14 Jul 2024

Since my first activation gave me the “outdoor radio” bug, I had been checking out the local POTA spots to see what the local scene is like. Some spots have dozens or hundreds of QSOs from some monster activators like M0MJA and 2E0HPI, whom I could never dream of catching....

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