“There’s no such thing as a bad day in the Great Blue Sky Shack,” they say, but despite the bright sunshine and the beginnings of Spring all around me, this one started to make me doubt.

One of Luscombe Valley’s watercourses

With most of Poole’s POTA entities already activated, today was the turn of all-time new one GB-4193 Luscombe Valley Nature Reserve. Honestly, it’s not great from a POTA perspective—but it’s a red dot sticking out that needs to go green.

Map of local parks from the “new parks” web app

Luscombe Valluey is a small wedge of managed marshland, pressed upon from all sides by the ridiculous celebrity houses and golf courses of the Sandbanks peninsula. Honestly, I think if it was dry enough to build on, the council would have sold it by now and it would be home to a dozen millionaires. Oh yes, this is a damp one, especially in March—if anything even muddier than the Stour, and with less open space to activate. By comparison I also came away with much fewer QSOs in the log to show for it, and no childhood memories to bore you with either.

Route taken to my activation spot

The triangle of grass right by the road is really the only open space suitable for antennas, but this was far too overlooked and noisy for me, and so I set off up the valley. The paths varied on a scale from “squelchy” to “impassable”, and more time was spent testing for patches of mud that would hold my weight than actually walking. In the boggier patches, logs had been placed as stepping-stones, but unfortunately damp mossy wood and muddy boots are not a good combination when friction is the only thing keeping you from sliding sideways into the water.

Logs placed to trap the unwary

On the plus side, the challenge level of reaching the top end of the park meant I largely had it to myself. On the negative side, my only real choice for an activation spot was one small clearing not too far from where some kids were playing in their £10M garden, so I definitely must have looked suspicious to the two groups that did make it up that far.

It was nice to sit for a while, surrounded by chirping robins and the promise of a Spring not far off, but unfortunately as I mentioned, the radio side of today’s excursion was a little disappointing. I started on 20 metres as usual and hunted three park-to-parks, followed by my own CQ calls which netted me another 16. But though the reports I received always had a good signal strength, there was no pile-up today, and after 10 minutes or so they tailed off to nothing.

While I could have perservered, 20m was a bit of a last-minute decision. With a west-facing slope to the valley, what I really wanted was to try 10 metres as well. I knew the ARRL DX contest would be filling the band, but I hoped to make some quick contest QSOs to see how far into North America I was getting. The answer, sadly: not very far. I really struggled to break through the pile-ups, and after a paltry two QSOs in 10 minutes, I was getting fed up and decided to call it quits on that too.

My last job for the day was for the Ham Challenge, where this week’s challenge was to work an FM repeater on the 10 metre band. This was new territory for me, and I struggled, first to find the right range of frequencies, then to find the CTCSS settings on my rig. There are two 10m repeaters active in the UK, which I tried first, but they are too far away for ground-wave propagation and much too close for skywave in conditions like today’s.

I did eventually manage to hear a good chat going on on VE3MMX in Ontario, including one ham from the UK and another from Jamaica, so the band was well open. Unfortunately their conversation went on for a while, and I thought it would be rude to try to break in just for one perfunctory QSO to tick off the challenge, but I also didn’t have the time or the patience for a proper ragchew.

By that point, with the sun setting behind the trees and the cold seeping in, bramble scratches starting to itch and another wade through stinking mud in my near future, I decided I’d had enough. It was very cool to have heard a repeater on a different continent, and maybe one day I will have a nice chat with folks on it, in this sunspot cycle or the next. But not today.

Map of contacts from the activation

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too grumpy after all. Comparing that map to the one from my first activation where I was happy to have got 10 UK contacts in four hours, gives me a sense of perspective I could do with after a mediocre activation like today’s. If I’d have known then that—only nine months later—I would get two QSOs with the USA and consider that a disappointment, I would have thought it absolutely ridiculous.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. Many thanks to my contacts this afternoon, and see you on the air next time!

Poole Harbour at low tide, from Shore Road