A QSO with a POTA Hunter Operating a Very Unusual Rig

I just returned from a 9-day POTA camping trip with my wife in Ontario’s Algonquin Park region. We stayed in provincial park campgrounds using our travel trailer for accommodation. And, of course, I “activated” each park for POTA – with one exception, and there is a cautionary tale concerning that exception!

The trip took in four parks:

At the third park we visited – Lake St Peter VE-0265 – I managed to fit in two activations. The first activation started with an encouraging Park-to-Park contact with M0TTQ on 17-meters. He was activating a park in England and we exchanged honest-to-goodness 599 reports.

Then I switched to 20-meters where most of the POTA activity was happening. My frequency was 14.093 – a little further up the band than usual for CW operators. I was trying to avoid the contest happening at the bottom of the band. No luck with that though; contact number three was with a contest station in Russia.

Then I heard another station calling me. I could tell that the operator was using a straight key by the cadence of the dits and dahs. I usually use paddles for POTA operations although I have a collection of straight keys. The advantage of paddles is the precise timing of the code elements, while straight keys rely on the operator’s skill to keep the timing precise. The hunter’s signal was easy to copy but the timing was a little looser than the average straight key generated signal.

Unorthodox Rig Indeed!

Later I received an email from the hunter. He was Walter KA4KXX in Orlando, Florida. He thanked me for the QSO and sent me a picture of the rig he was using. To say it was an unorthodox rig would be quite an understatement. It was a homebrew 25 watt rig built in the Manhattan style with the transceiver modules built on separate circuit boards. Walter’s key was a microswitch! Well that explained the slightly loose timing of his code elements.

In a subsequent email exchange Walter offered a little more detail about his rig. The basic design provides an output power of just six watts, but Walter added a homebrew amplifier to boost his signal up to 25 watts. He kindly agreed to let me use his picture of the radio in this blog.

“All together I have about 8 homebrew single conversion superhet transceivers that I use on a regular basis, and the one I sent to you is just the latest. Certainly you can use any of my photos however you like. If you decide to try a project yourself, certainly there are a lot of us in the Soldersmoke community available to help you…
Walter KA4KXX”

I completed the park activation but it took longer than usual. Conditions were not great and perhaps the contest that was filling the band had put off many hunters. I stayed on-the-air for 51 minutes to make only 13 contacts. I might have stayed out longer but the area was thick with hungry, aggressive mosquitoes!

Never Forget to Recharge Your Battery!

Hoping for better conditions the following day I did another activation of the park. Things improved a little and I logged 18 contacts in 41 minutes. The second activation was again cut short. Yes the mosquitoes were doing their level best to terminate radio operations but the main reason for going QRT was due to my Bioenno LiFePO4 12AH battery. I had failed to recharge the battery overnight and I could see the voltage starting on the steep downward voltage curve at the end of its discharge cycle. Either I quit or the Battery Management System would cut off the juice – possibly in mid-QSO!

Kaboom!

A final note; I did not attempt an activation at our fourth, and final park of the trip. En route to Silent Lake Provincial Park one of our two trailer tires exploded violently. We were stuck at the side of the busy highway baking in the hot sunshine until help arrived. When trailer tires fail they do so quite dramatically. Fortunately we had a spare but the experience was quite a shock and radio operations gave way to emergency planning for the long trip home!