Bike Mobile POTA Activation VE-0100

 

Earlier this year, I discovered 5 POTA parks and one SOTA summit lie on the routes that I like to cycle in the Tantramar region between SE New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada. So for the past few months, I've been building up a bike-mobile kit for QRP POTA work, especially on CW. And on Tuesday, it all came together with the activation of park VE-0100 the Tintamarre National Wildlife Area. While there are patches of this area only about 12km away from my home, I chose to go to the site of area's official sign, down an additional few km of dirt road. The whole route, including a stop for a beer with a friend back in my home town, is on the cycling social media site, Strava.

My backpacking seat bag (pictured above) carried everything I needed, including a comfortable camp chair and my near-new IC-705, housed in a bode bottle bag whose front pouch holds both the radio's mic and an N6ARA TinyPaddle. 

The antenna is a simple 20m 1/4 wave vertical with counterpoise of three raised wires. The 17' fiberglass mast is an Aliexpress purchase for about $20 CAD. I designed some stuff to be 3D printed to hold this up in the field and used 24 AWG silicon wire as the elements. These are wound on a printed winder with a mounted  BNC and joined with tiny banana connectors. You can see the bottom meter or so of the mast in the picture below. The collapsed mast is  a bit too big for the bag, and strapped to its top the mast nevertheless fell onto the road every 7km or so. I think I'll devise a way to strap it to the bike's top tube instead. 

Though I've done my fair share of contesting, as a primarily QRP operator, I rarely run stations, and I was a bit worried I'd  become befuddled. I dropped my CW speed to a very chill 16 wpm, but I needn't have: the extremely simple POTA exchanges made the copying really easy, and 14 stations were logged in about 25 minutes, including Italy and France. These two reported signals better than most of the NA stations: such is the joy of operating within 8km of the east coast!

I intended to QSY to 20m SSB, but the iPad program I use to work the IC-705 remotely had once again left a menu setting in a state such that the mic doesn't take in audio. I've fixed this before, but I wasn't going to figure it out again in the middle of a marsh. I'll get smart next time and store some presets that let me fix this with the push of a button.

Looking over the log, I think the best radiation angle of this antenna might be a bit low, not something I usually worry about! But while I'm happy to get 599 sigs into France, it's probably best for POTA if my reports in WV are better. I've built a few 49:1 EFHW transformers and have a 10m mast on order, so I'll try an end-fed inverted Vee or sloper sometime soon. But next up,  VE-4813, just 5km down a gravel road from the Tintamarre National Wildlife Area.