Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time at the picnic area at the east end of the Crissy Field promenade in the Presidio of San Francisco National Historic Site.
After working from home, in front of a computer and talking all day, it’s necessary to get out the house and get into the relaxing zone of making radio contacts with Morse code.
Because the relative ease of activating this park, I have my eyes on the first level “repeat offender” award in POTA, that is the “Oasis” activator. As of this writing, two more activations of K-7889 will achieve the award.
For this last activation of July (actually 1st August UTC) I was on my own and had no substantial time constraints. Over time I have worked out a system consisting of radio, antenna, and location that is reliable in producing contacts on 20 meters in the late afternoon.
I decided to stay on-air for one hour to see how many QSOs I could make, rather than just getting 10 and packing it in. Although there have been times when it has taken a whole hour just to get the 10 needed for a POTA activation!
Today, the POTA activation was secured in about the first 15 minutes, so I had plenty of time to see how many more hunters to whom I could give the park. Unfortunately, the sun and ionosphere have been conspiring to produce cycles of fading radio conditions on sub-hourly periods. The snappy QSO rate I enjoyed early on did last for the entire hour allotted.
By the the time I called QRT I had 22 contacts in the log, mostly from the southern half of the U.S. with little forays into the PNW and eastern Great Lakes, and one local on ground wave.
As usual, there were several familiar callsigns as well as many new ones. My thanks to all the hunters that called in response to my 5 watt signal.
73 de W6CSN
w6csn’s outdoor amateur radio 
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