w6csn’s outdoor amateur radio

Back in May of 2023 I visited San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge (US-0212). At the time, I was escaping the cold and drizzly weather in San Francisco as described in this earlier blog post.

There aren’t facilities here to support large groups so I was pretty confident that the place would be overlooked by the Labor Day celebrating masses.

I was quite surprised when I arrived, finding what was a lush grassy field in Spring took on a desert look now in late Summer.

The photo above is from my springtime visit a year ago, while the photo below is from today, taken from roughly the same viewpoint.

The grasses are dried up and plowed under. This land is protected under the Sonoma Land trust, so while it may be under agriculture it will never be developed.

Not really excited about eating lunch and activating in front of a dry, dusty field of dirt we followed the Bay Trail for a short way, across the S.M.A.R.T. train right of way and up to the levee that overlooks San Pablo Bay.

The levee features some informational signs, a kayak launch, and importantly, several benches placed there for city folk that come out to the country to activate POTA.

I started out just using the whip on the KH1, but after hunting W5MTN in Arizona and getting a pretty weak signal report I concluded that a little more antenna was in order.

Not being in the mood to put up anything more elaborate, I bungeed a tenkara rod to the adjacent bench and ran up the Polystealth wire I use with my 20 meter EFHW.

I didn’t bring the 64:1 transformer and instead attached the wire to a BNC binding post. The internal tuner on the KH1 handled this just fine with a 1.7 to 1 SWR match. Good enough.

I don’t really know what propagation conditions were like today, but the activation was strictly a western states affair with QSOs mainly from the Pacific Northwest. Although there was cluster of Southern California contacts, which is unusual for me on 20 meters.

The main takeaway is that this particular location has a whole different character depending on what time year you visit.

73 de W6CSN