It’s a week of leave from work, I have nothing urgent to do, and so: my second POTA activation in two days!
This one had a very different feel to Saturday’s sunny afternoon activation. The day dawned damp and windy, but at least not actively raining—sadly, that was to change almost immediately as soon as I got into the car. By the time I reached the cliff tops, it was coming down as a slow steady fall, and the coast was wrapped in low-level cloud.
Misty view of Bournemouth beach and pier from Canford Cliffs. Hengistbury Head is on the horizon at the right.
Not willing to waste my trip (or the extortionate parking), I wandered for a while in search of somewhere I could set up out of the rain. There are a couple of wooden shelters near to Western Road car park, but neither offered a place to site an antenna without it being in other people’s way or out of my sight.
Once I got as far as deciding the rain had stopped, and had half an antenna up, before the weather changed its mind and I had to pack down again. Not that I mind the weather too much—I am British after all, and humans are pretty waterproof. But sadly FT-891s are not, and I wasn’t willing to risk the field radio that I spent months agonising over buying.
So I did that one thing I said I never wanted to do: activate a park from my car.
My operating location. I’m getting out in nature, honest.
This is a relatively new park, GB-1728 Poole Bay Cliffs, and I would only be the second activator. My activation spot is not technically on the protected cliff area, but as that’s both off-limits and at severe risk of landslides, I hope the POTA police won’t mind me placing my antenna five metres back from the edge. My spot also isn’t really that close to UK Bunker G/B-0232 ROC Post Canford Cliffs, but is within the 1km radius so I decided to count it. I checked out the actual bunker location for a potential activation spot, but not only is there no structure there, it’s also overlooked by about 100 hotel balconies. Anxiety won out, and I found a more secluded place to set up instead.
I started off with a bunch of park-to-park QSOs, thinking I would probably just stick with my 10 for POTA, and not worry about 25 for UKBOTA, since the weather was so bad. But after seven, I was struggling to get through to the other POTA stations, and decided to call CQ.
As usual, the pile-up delivered, and I feel rude for leaving while it’s going on. So 40 minutes and 47 QSOs later, I finally had a break from callers, and decided to swap to 10m.
By this time the weather had cleared a bit, although I was still getting drizzled on as I went to reconfigure the antenna.
10 metres, unfortunately, was a total washout. I heard one US station, KK2W, but was unable to get through, and hunting the various US POTA stations on the band was similarly unsuccessful.
After ten minutes of CQ calls, I only had two in the log. One was Adrian, M7EFA who let me know that my pre-recorded CQ message had an odd sound to it over the air, so that’s useful knowledge at least—I will have to re-record that. However, by that point the time was getting near to 1400, and I’d come out without my lunch, so I decided to call it quits for today.
See you on the air next time!
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