So I ended up hitting K-0225 this morning and had a couple things that I wanted to accomplish at the park today. The first was to get at least one more p2p (park-to-park) as I was one away from getting my p2p award and secondarily to test out a mast holder I made.
So for the first part that was almost laughably easy. There is always great people on at other parks and running a 100 watts meant that I could pretty easily make contact with them if I could here them. So that was in the bag.
The other item to test was I put together a drive over mast holder. There are quite a few parks I’ve been at where the parking lot is inside the park. This means I can easily activate from the vehicle. Now I don’t have any antennas I can throw on the roof or easily stake into the ground so I need to get the dipole up. I also looked online and while not super expensive other drive over mast holders were more than I really wanted to pay for. So with some scrap wood, screws and a little time I ended up with a pretty simple one made from scratch. I will admit that the way it’s made I need to be a little careful placing it as I accidentally put the rings for the mast on the car side instead of on the outside but meh. I just like to think it puts it closer to the point where the holder meets the tire so it’s…better?
It also worked perfectly. I got the vehicle in an out of the way place and simply put the holder behind the tire and backed up. From there threw the mast in, antenna on and got everything up in the air. Had absolutely not problems and activation was super easy. It’s also nice if I can use the holder because then I don’t need to tie/guy the mast which makes it really fast. With it working so well now I just need to either paint, lacquer or stain it.
Last weekend 20m was pretty packed and this weekend was no different. However I could spot myself and so took some time to find a clear frequency and started calling. Figured this time as I didn’t hear anyone after calling frequency in use I’d keep using it till that wasn’t the case. Shortly after I had all the contacts I needed.
Overall this was a great activation where it was a little cloudy and cooler but I’ll take that over blisteringly hot any day of the week!
