SOTA Mt. Davidson W6/NC-423 Photobombed by Fighter Jets and Hummingbirds

In addition to some interesting ham radio happenings, there were fighter jets and hummingbirds. Stand-alone cameras rock!

Park:

Mt. Davidson in San Francisco: W6/NC-423

I used the best-for-me-for-early-morning-transit route I mentioned in my last SOTA report for this summit. I also used my Google Pixel phone to record the actual slope of the hike up from the bus stop. You might remember that I took umbrage that Google claimed the route was almost flat. Today, I measured it using the 'degrees off kilter' display on my cell phone. The slope is a wopping 12 degrees. Hardly flat. Here's what the world looks like if you take a picture of the 'mostly flat' sidewalk:

Radio Details and Gear:

I saw that the qrper.com trip reports include a gear list. I hadn't ever thought about it before, so I figured I try it out. Interesting, or no?

Radio: A green board Rockmite 20. You can get the red board kit at QRPMe.

Antenna: 12 gauge wire cut to a half-wave dipole, mounted directly to the radio via a BNC to Banana Plug converter.

Antenna mount: two spools of butcher's twine

8 x Duracell Optimum AA batteries

Kokuyo Sooofa Soft Ring Notebook - A5 - 4 mm Graph - Yellow Green

Stabilo Point 88 Fineliner Pen - 0.4 mm - Black

Ethernet CAT-5 Cable (35 foot length) [My current cable was borrowed from a local makerspace. The link points to the replacement I ordered. I'll keep you posted on how well it works.

QSO/RBN spot map:

These maps were also featured in a TIL today:

or in Google Earth.

Happenings of Interest

The summit was full of hummingbirds today! It is on most days, but with the sunlight, it was particularly delightful. Then, one of them actually perced on the dipole for a few seconds!

The birds were also interesting for what they taught me about cameras that aren't on a phone. My replacement Google Pixel 6a (you know from the replacement plan) occasionally reboots when I take a picture. Then, the pictures gone, whatever other data I hadn't saved is gone; it's a pain. So, I grabbed my old Panasonic DMC-FZ8. I haven't used it in years, and Wow!

The camera was released in 2007. I probably bough mine in 2008. It just takes pictures. That might sound simplistic, so let me expand. There's no startup time, no entering a security code, and no clicking on a camera app button. Also? It has optical zoom and an actual viewfinder. I could see what I was taking a picture of . When I accidentally captured the fighter jets in the lead picture above, I could see them. I knew they had just photobombed me, (pun not intended, but kinda cool anyway.) Also, thanks to optical zoom, I was standing a good 40 yards back from the edge of the summit taking a picture of the radio that framed the jets really well.

Back to hummingbirds. The jets weren't the only photobomobers. I thought I had taken a nice picture of the downtown skyline.

But on further review at home, I realized I'd also caught one of the hummingbirds clowning around!

Pretty cool, and it never would have happened with the cell phone camera.

The radio was spookily contancerous today. It seemed like signal levels were low, and then would ramp back up to high for no reason. Fortunately—I guess—the radio is showing some of the same behavior back at home, so I guess I can debug it before we head out camping at the end of next week. It looks like the unshielded antenna wire had wandered too close to the also-unshielded audio output wire. Moving these two apart seems to have solved the issue.

Using the atlatl method, antenna placement was pretty awesome. I was even able to lob the twine over an even higher branch for the second half of the activation.

QSO Log

Table containing QSOs in text

Callsign	rx RST	tx RST	Time (GMT)	Frequency
WW4D	339	449	2023/05/07 14:06:00	14058.4
WW7D	559	319	2023/05/07 15:36:00	14058.4
NO2D	579	559	2023/05/07 15:37:00	14058.4
N6PKT	559	529	2023/05/07 15:44:00	14058.4
K6EL	599	599	2023/05/07 15:53:00	14058.4
W4NA	559	329	2023/05/07 15:04:00	14058.4

POTA tx QSL:

QSL rx album:

References

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Copasetic Flow

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