Trans-Canada Trail Bicycle Mobile POTA Activation

A fine Thursday night, only somewhat spoiled by a record-breaking mosquito population, and another "park" activated by bicycle mobile QRP. The photo above shows what I'm using to carry the equipment: a seat-stem backpacking pack, with the fiberglass mast strapped to the top. I thought I'd solved the problem of it falling off when on the way in the dollar-store velcro elastic straps seemed to do the job, but more on that later.

I'd wondered if this park, being perhaps the most activated in Canada (spanning the whole country) would prove less popular with hunters than the last two, neither of which have been activated more than 5 times. 33 QSOs over about an hour suggests that's not the case, though I was beginning to doubt the endeavour after the first 5 minutes of calling CQ with no takers. Eventually they streamed in, and Europeans, too, including a QSO with YU9CF in Serbia. I've long dreamt of a Balkans bike camping trip; a Balkans bike camping and POTA trip sounds even better!

But if that's ever going to happen, I think I'm going to have to slim down the kit a bit. 

The picture to the right shows what I've been carrying: mast, guying kit, radials and vertical on a winder; two coax cables (because for some reason I'm paranoid about a cable failing); notebook and pen; hat and bug spray; and the rig in a bode bottle holder. The rig is an IC-705 plus a micro keyer. All-in-all, it weighs in at 3.5kg (7.7 lb). 1.5kg of this is the rig. A Mini QCX is very tempting, though it has to be remembered that the IC-705 includes a battery and can be called on for many different modes and bands once I get out of this 20m CW rut.

Some thoughts on operating. I used 14.060 MHz, and I think I won't in the future. Though I called QRL? to start things off, eventually I was clearly sharing the channel with others. Probably just about any other number would have been better. One person called me repeatedly buy apparently couldn't hear me when I gave them their exchange. It happened more than once with the same callsign. At least two of the hunters were apparently pretty new to CW, and I made a mental note that if I'm doing a longer activation like this, I should set aside some time for QRS ops. I think if I called "QRS OPS ONLY" many old hands would hold off to let the new folks get their chance and that would be kind of fun. Probably running 20 wpm some of the time and 12 WPM for a short period is more helpful than 16 WPM all the time.

Now to the cycling. These routes are about 75% the length of my usual rides; yet I've consistently found them far more tiring. On this one in particular, I was pretty beat the next day. I think there are two possible reasons. First, the added weight. Though I wasn't climbing much at all, so I'm not sure of that. The other reason might be the go-stop-go-again nature of these trips. The lead legs after doing radio are quite something.

Finally, that darn mast. On the way back, I decided to ride the gravel Trans-Canada trail back home, and sure enough the mast silently dropped off the pack. What's worse, it unthreaded its base, so when I finally backtracked I found it in the hand of a friendly dog walker who told me the segments were all over the trail. The very top one was never retrieved, alas.

I have to figure out a way to securely strap it to the bikepacking pack. I'm thinking of making strap loops on the orange 3D-printed TPU cap you can see in the photo. Then a strap loops through two caps on either end and through the strap loops on the pack. I'm only deterred by the hassle of removing TPU printing from a print bed.

Up next: testing the 10m carbon fibre mast in the backyard on multiple bands before taking it on a bit of an adventure.