It’s fair to say the Tassie Ham Radio Conference lit a fire under me, particularly when Marty VK4KC started talking about POTA and at the same time showing how quickly he could get on air with a loaded coil whip of his design, sold as Mad Dog Coils. Having spent my fair share of time making end fed half wave antennas and linked dipoles, the idea of a free-standing antenna without the need to find a tree or a spot to tie a telescopic fibreglass mast to has a lot of appeal. I quickly handed over my money in exchange for a Mad Dog coil and walked away a happy man. But then I needed to buy the other “bits”
A week later and a bit of pre-testing and I was ready to go. Having just had a local gravel beach added to POTA I was keen to be the first activator. Unfortunately the best time to go activating a beach in a Tasmanian spring/summer is about the same time the sea-breeze winds are the strongest.
After taking some time to set up and familiarise myself with the Ham2k Portable Logger, I put out my POTA spot and first CQ call and was moderately surprised to have Larry F5PYI respond – working France on 2.5 watts SSB was not something I was expecting to do.
I ended up being around 25 mins QRV, working mostly Australians, but along with Larry I managed to work Raffaele IK4IDP from Italy, resulting in 11 QSLs, and a successful first POTA activation.
With it only taking a couple of minutes to set up, and that again to pack up, you can bet I will be doing more POTA activities in the very near future.