Bike Mobile POTA Mini-adventure

 

My last POTA adventure was two summers ago, but with a new bike beckoning and several new parks appearing on the pota.app map page, it was time to give a local activation a try. This time, I cycled over to the Campbell Carriage Factory Museum, a beautifully situated and restored facility about 5km north of the trans-Canada highway as it passes by Sackville, NB. If you're driving by on your way to Nova Scotia, consider buying a lunch at the usual places on the highway and driving up to this site to eat and enjoy the setting.

After a bit of a disappointment on 30m in August, I stuck to 20m this time and -- probably more importantly -- was sure to publish my plan on pota.app so the spotting network could get me up. My antenna is a wire 1/4 wave vertical with 3 radials drooping from 1m off the ground to touching it. Rather than using bikepacking bags, I just threw everything in a backpack; since the ride was only about 8km away, I wasn't going to get any aches from riding with the weight on my back. This also meant that the 5m telescoping mast was sticking out of my backpack and I could keep an eye on it whenever I did a shoulder check, a better situation than it slowly making itself free from a rear bag.

I set up behind the main building with my back to a conveniently situated quarried cube of about 1.7m a side and the antenna stuck in a small birch tree. Facing me, to the East, were the hay and grain fields of the Tantramar Marsh. I wanted to be a bit discreet, since there were homes all around, but in retrospect, having the stone and building only inches to the W of the antenna was likely a mistake.

We have had a record-breaking dry spell in this area, so mosquitoes were not a problem as dusk came on, and I easily put in 45 minutes of CW at 5w, getting 20 QSOs, one of which was a frustratingly busted call. I copied S5SH, which I knew was wrong, and couldn't discern between the dits and dahs. I thought I could work it over with the IC-705's automatic audio recording function, but when I got home I found out -- to my dismay -- that I'd fiddled with those controls a while back and it didn't trigger. Sorry, my friend.

Otherwise, the trend seemed to be that Europe was as loud as Eastern North America, and the West was almost absent, with KG7CW in Idaho a notable exception. 

Now the Marsh is only miles from the Bay of Fundy, putting salt water inside the Fresnel zone. Thus strong European contacts are part of the game. But the weaker than normal signals to the West needed explanation. Other times I've put this vertical up on the Marsh, I've had a clear field around me; this time there was my bike, me, the quarry stone and the whole (mainly wooden) factory building to the West of the antenna. All of that was dampening the signal in that direction, I believe.

Until next time, Bruce