w6csn’s outdoor amateur radio

It is not uncommon for California to experience a spell of warm weather in late January or February with temperatures rising into the mid-60s °F. This typically occurs when high barometric pressure builds over the eastern Pacific and into the Pacific Northwest, causing an offshore wind flow over California.

With the warm temperatures came a wonderful display of altocumulus clouds throughout the day. In fact, the real reason this activation gets a blog post is to show some pictures of the pretty clouds!

Enough about the weather, let’s talk radio. The FT-818 has been getting a lot of use recently. While it does lack a built-in antenna “tuner” and CW message memory, it’s the closest I have to a shack-in-a-box. And, it’s the only portable HF radio I presently have that goes above 20 meters.

Collapsing the lower three and a half sections of the MFJ-1979 telescoping whip, I am able to get a good match on 15 meters, which is where I started this activation. By operating on 21MHz late in the day, my hope was to get some Pacific-rim DX as well as the more likely stateside QSOs. The strategy paid off with three Japanese stations responding to my CQ POTA calls. Sigs weren’t strong, but with some persistence we were able to complete the required exchange of callsigns.

Next, I tuned the radio to 20 meters and fully extended the whip antenna for a one-to-one match. The N0NBH space weather report on qrz.com showed the geomagnetic field to be in “unsettled” territory and QRN on 14 megahertz was getting up to S5. Nevertheless, propagation was still quite good with calls from all over the USA, Canada and Alaska.

With the sun dipping below the western bluffs of the Presidio of San Francisco, I sent a final QRT after one last call from N4GO in Kentucky. El Niño winters can bring a mixed bag of interesting weather to Northern California and today’s “t-shirt” weather was perfect for getting out for a little outdoor amateur radio.

73 de W6CSN