We are continuing working our way around local parks, nerding out on the radio in all the places we haven’t previously nerded before. This afternoon it was the turn of Moors Valley Country Park, POTA ref. GB-1724.

This place is the peak of childhood days out, aged about 6-10. There’s a huge play park, a whole play trail through the woods with stuff to climb on every hundred metres or so, and best of all—a miniature railway.

Miniature railway at Moors Valley

Things have moved on since the early 90s, and nowadays it also features a “Go Ape” high-wire activity course for older teens and adults, hireable Segways, and more.

What it doesn’t have, though, is a nice big grassy area with picnic tables in an out-of-the-way location where kids and dogs won’t be constantly running across your ground radials. But as usual, we make do.

We set up on a bench with a few square metres of grass around it, down by the lake. It’s on a popular trail with various musical instruments staged around it for kids to play with, so not exactly a secluded location, but I chose to go down by the lake instead of into the forest, and by the time we’d found somewhere half-decent, it was too late to change our minds.

The lake at Moors Valley

I’m not sure quite why, but our radio refused to put out much above 50W today. This could have been due to the whip being in contact with tree branches, or the less than ideal layout of the radials, but we persevered anyway—we used to activate on 10W so 50 is plenty!

After three park-to-parks to get us into the swing of things on 20 metres, we put out our own CQ calls and got 17 callers before they tapered off. Not quite in the same league as previous pile-ups we’ve received, but still easily enough for a POTA activation. This spot doesn’t qualify for WWFF, so we didn’t have to chase 44 to complete the activation.

I got a message from Vic, EI5IYB on the OARC Discord asking if we could try 40 metres as well. I was keen to try, since we missed 40 on our previous activation, and I still have plenty to learn about how the vertical antenna performs on the band during the day time. Unfortunately we hand’t brought the NanoVNA on this trip, so we had to tune it the old fashioned way. We got to an SWR of around 2:1, not ideal but as with the previous band my radio was still happy to chuck 50W into it.

The 40 metre band was if anything even worse than 20 for QSB, and as usual for 40 it was difficult to find a free spot at all. Vic helped us out hugely by finding free frequencies for us to try, most of which got taken out by other stations immediately, but we managed to hold on to 7118kHz for ten minutes or so. After Vic, we had three more QSOs before once again we were crowded out by QRM. By that point the light was starting to fade, so we decided to call it quits there with a total of 24 in the log.

IOTA (Idiots on the Air) activation

If nothing else, we’ve learned that we don’t necessarily need to pack the inverted-V dipole if we want to play on 40 metres. Even though the dipole is ideal for NVIS when the band is “short”, and the vertical is very much not ideal, we still managed to get out to Ireland and Belgium during the daytime. And while we still can’t quite replicate the SWR of 1.3:1 that the manual promises for the vertical, it’s still usable and I’m impressed how well the FT-891 copes with it.

Many thanks and Happy New Year to all our contacts this afternoon. See you on the air next time!