After JOTA, where my daughter casually snagged her 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 an experienced CW operator, whereas all I have at my disposal is SSB. But I do have a 100W portable rig, and now an antenna that I can tune on the higher bands.

Plus, it’s October—the high bands are open at my latitude, the sunspot cycle is at its peak, and autumn still has a few warm, sunny weekends to offer.

The game was afoot.

View of Hengistbury Head Nature Reserve and Christchurch Harbour

This is Hengistbury Head, a popular dog- and child-walking spot that separates the easternmost end Bournemouth beach on one side from Christchurch Harbour on the other.

(For the non-locals in the audience, the i, t and the u are all silent. “Hengsbry”.)

In POTA terms this is GB-1727, Christchurch Harbour Site of Special Scientific Interest, which also encompasses the beach on the seaward side and all of the headland, from the visitors’ centre all the way down to the harbour entrance. The area south of the visitor’s centre is also the former site of a Chain Home radar installation. While it was removed back in the 70s, it counts as bunker G/B-1100 for UK Bunkers on the Air.

Southbourne beach at Hengistbury Head, looking west towards the Purbecks. North America lies somewhere beyond.

Being such a popular spot, it’s hard to find an out-of-the-way place to set up. I settled on halfway up the cliffs, up a steep path with 20 metres of shin-scratching gorse bushes. Nevertheless, eight inquisitive kids, their indulgent parents, and somehow also two small dogs made it up there over the course of a couple of hours.

Now one problem we had at JOTA was a contest running at the same time; we gave up on 40m after being unable to find any space whatsoever in the band, and stuck to 20m. If you recognise the date, you’ll see where this is going—this weekend had a contest too. The contest: CQ WW SSB.

But how bad could it be, I thought? I was there to DX on 10m, a huge band in terms of space allocated to amateurs. I’d find somewhere free, and get calling CQ POTA.

Haha, nope.

The great thing about operating portable, away from built-up areas and their pesky RF noise floor, is that you can hear everything—in this case, 800kHz of wall-to-wall “CQ Contest”, absolutely zero space for anything else.

I brought Field Spotter out and found a couple of POTA stations in north-eastern US & Canada, but they were almost completely wiped out by contesters on nearby (and even the same) frequency. Not a promising start to my first transatlantic park-to-park attempt.

My antenna on the clifftop, under an interesting sky

Well the antenna was set up for 10m and I wanted my first bunker activation to be a success, and that meant 25 contacts. Not having found any space to call CQ, I simply started at around 28600 kHz and worked my way up the dial, giving my “59 14” to every contest station I found that wasn’t dealing with too big a pile-up. An hour and 200 kHz later, I had 25 in the log, and I was free to play around.

Field Spotter showed spots of a few stations in North America on 12m, a WARC band where contests are not allowed. This had rapidly become my plan too, when I found that 10m was full—the propagation characteristics are similar, and if others had the same idea the other side of the pond, we should be good for the attempt.

I’d not tuned the JPC-12 for 12m before, so I brought the NanoVNA into the field with me. A quick adjustment in increasingly windy conditions brought the SWR down, but only to a wide sweeping curve with about 1.75:1 at the lowest. Nevertheless, the FT-891 still seemed happy to chuck 100W into that, so off we went.

Honestly, who needs a radio shack when you can have this?

VE1SK in Nova Scotia was the closest. He was faint, barely audible over the RF noise and the wind noise, but I heard the CQ call, chucked my callsign in, and hoped for the best.

Now I’m sure the QRP folks scoff at my needing to drag a 10kg pack into the field, and the CW operators probably get park-to-park DX all the time, but SSB and a QRO radio is all I have at my disposal, so it would have to do.

It turns out there is a special kind of thrill, the first time you drop into someone’s CQ POTA with a callsign from another continent, and just casually stick “park-to-park” on the end.

I’ve never been on the receiving end of that yet—maybe soon, now that I am playing with the higher bands—but I love to imagine there’s a moment of “wait, did I hear that right?” on the other side.

With the signal faint and the wind rising, it was a tough QSO. I gave him a 31 and he give me 51, which was reassuring. And after a couple of minutes of repeated overs, it was done.

My first transatlantic park-to-park, in the log.

I was riding the wave, so naturally I had to get another one before the day was out. Field Spotter showed a couple more along the US east coast, but after five minutes of listening, I just couldn’t make out enough to call in. Then K0WML popped up, in Minnesota, halfway across the continent. Could I make it? I could! 32 for him, and he came back to me with 23. I could just about make out him giving me his park reference as well, I confirmed and gave mine back, and he copied it first time.

Well that was mission accomplished. Two transatlantic park-to-parks in the log on my first try. Time was ticking on, and I had a roast dinner to cook that evening, so I packed down and headed home.

I find something uniquely amazing about working DX like this, two people an ocean apart, each with a bit of wire stuck in the ground or tied to a tree.

It’s a little more than 120 years since the first ever transatlantic radio contact, and of course we shouldn’t be surprised at how much technology has improved in that time. But compared to the internet, a fundamentally digital technology that we have seen evolve beyond recognition in our lifetimes, there seems to me something about radio that is more constrained by the laws of physics. If Marconi needed a dozen wires over a kilometer long and countless kilowatts to bridge the Atlantic, surely we always would! But here we are, sat in fields and on cliff tops, with with a short metal pole and some ribbon cable ground radials, having a chat over 6000 kilometers of ionosphere.

As a nice bonus, 12 metres is also the wavelength that would have been used by the Chain Home radar installation, 80 years ago.

Thanks to all my contacts today, including Craig, K1CT for my new SSB distance record of 6513 km, and especially to Steve, VE1SK and Bill, K0WML for my first transatlantic park-to-parks. A pleasure to work you all.

See you on the air next time!