• Edging Into The Late Shift

    Edging Into The Late Shift

    A later arrival at my usual spot and an hour and a half of available operating time meant that if propagation cooperated I could get some “late shift” activator QSOs into my POTA stats. Late shift at K-7889 starts at 0200Z and my first contact of the evening was a quick park-to-park with WB0RLJ at…

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  • Richardson East Benchmark

    Richardson East Benchmark

    Richardson East Benchmark is the name given to the Summits On The Air (SOTA) peak located in the Marin Headlands above Sausalito, California and just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The prominence, at an elevation of 1,111 feet (339 meters) makes it a good spot to locate some commercial service and broadcast towers, with…

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  • Comfort of Home

    Comfort of Home

    When you activate the same park regularly it becomes rather routine. You probably have a system worked out consisting of radio, antenna, time and location that produces good results most of the time. Not every one of my outings to K-7889 Presidio of SF gets a writeup here on this blog, that would get boring…

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  • K-7889 Quick Take

    Amateur radio operations from K-7889 for me is as much about just getting on the air as it is about adding to POTA tallies. When you work from home and your QTH features S9+ man-made noise levels then a little POTA operation is a great way to get out of the house and make some…

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  • SF Maritime NHP POTA Activation

    There are several Parks On The Air eligible parks in San Francisco and the northern tip of the peninsula of the same name. One would expect that a POTA activator that calls this city home, would have logged activations from all of these parks, but so far this one has eluded me. The San Francisco…

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  • Base Hit On An 0-2 Count

    A quick perusal of some of the POTA operator profile pages will show that while I am certainly enthusiastic, I’m far from prolific. Some of those ops are on another level entirely, hundreds of activations and 10s of thousands of QSOs. That said, when I get close to achieving one of the POTA “awards”, I…

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  • Pop-Up POTA

    Pop-Up POTA

    While the rest of the country basks in the warmth of an aging summer, here in San Francisco we are treated 56°F, west winds gusting to 25 mph, and fog right down to the surface. If you wait for nice weather to go POTA in, you might wait until September. You just have to get…

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  • Oasis Journey

    Oasis Journey

    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…

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  • Summer Vacation Mountain POTA

    Our family regularly enjoys a summer vacation in the mountains. There is no shortage of mountains along the Pacific Coast, but if you refer to “The Mountains” around our house everybody knows you are talking about 5500 feet up the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada along Highway 4 near the town of Arnold. Last…

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  • Ordinary Home Park POTA

    It’s been a couple of weeks since I’d activated my home park of K-7889 The Presidio of San Francisco National Historic Site. So after work today, I collected some radio equipment and headed down to East Beach for a POTA attempt. I like East Beach because of the close proximity to the Bay waters which…

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