First CW POTA

I’m not a stranger to Parks on The Air, or to activating parks. But I’ve never made a CW contact before, and I just barely know how to send about half of the alphabet. About three months ago Randy offered to elmer me in my first ever CW only POTA activation. I wanted to have more practice before making the attempt, but with Randy’s help and a Saturday morning at my disposal we set out for Jonathan Dickinson State Park.

The Setup #

Randy brought his patent-pending window screen grounding system.

The antenna system as consists of a large mag mount antenna base, two aluminum window screens and a large pie tin. In theory the antenna base capacitively couples to the window screens. Randy likes to add an additional alligator clip to bond the screens to the ground on the antenna mount. Add to this a “sporty forty” coil from Wolf River Coils, and a 213" whip and you get a quick to deploy vertical antenna that doesn’t take up a ton of space and doesn’t require any stakes in the ground.

The radio for the day was a QRP Labs QMX. With a blazing 37 dBm of power! Randy assured me that would be plenty.

In my haste to get set up, I didn’t get a good picture of the antenna, but you can just make it out in the background here as well as the radio and battery.

The Activation #

We made 14 contacts in a little under two hours, half of those were park to park. Our furthest contact was to Niagra Falls, NY, 1,100 miles away

Not bad for 5 Watts!

I think it’ll be a while before I attempt another CW activation on my own, but huge thanks to Randy for guiding me through this!