w6csn’s outdoor amateur radio

Sonoma Coast State Park is a fairly long drive from San Francisco, across Marin county, and through the pastoral farmlands of western Sonoma county.

This activation took place from the Bodega Dunes day use area which is accessed off Highway 1, just north of Bodega Bay.

Back in March of 2023 I purchased an annual “Poppy Pass” which gives access to most state parks, recreation areas, and beaches in the California State Parks system. After displaying the pass at the ranger station I drove the half mile or so to the day use area. Bunches of fragrant yellow flowers punctuate the dunes on both sides of the road out toward the beach.

It was a bright and sunny day along the Sonoma coast, so I chose a picnic table for my operating position that was partially shaded by low trees. While this gave good protection from the sun, later it started to get chilly as a mild breeze started in from the ocean.

I could have used the EFHW flying from a fiberglass mast nestled into these scrubby trees, but instead decided to try out the newly acquired MFJ-1976 10 foot telescoping whip antenna which I bought to use with the tripod vertical loading coil. I had been using a folding “manpack” style whip, but as noted in an earlier post this antenna seems to have developed a problem with contact between some of the sections.

An advantage of the MFJ whip is that I can adjust its length to get a match on the higher HF frequencies where the loading coil is completely bypassed.

There was no cell service at all at this location so spotted myself on pota.app by sending a message to the sotamāt system using my Garmin InReach satellite communicator. I could have also spotted by playing FT8 tones from the sotamāt app through the FT-818 on SSB, but the Garmin was easier and I have plenty of messages available.

I started on 20 meters, went up to 15 meters, then back down to 17m before wrapping up, again on 20. The activation finished up with a total of 12 contacts in the US and Canada.

With the slightly rising terrain to the east, I felt like much of my signal was going into the hillside with the low takeoff angle of the vertical. It took the better part of two hours to complete the activation. Most of my reports were in the 449 neighborhood