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TouCans and A Tent Pole West Side of Organ Mountains US-4551 Activation

 


Gate mounted vertical at US-4551 on the west side of the Organs.

KOBTY and I tried a few different things with TouCans that had never happenned before First, we operated on the Western slope of the Organs by Dripping Springs. Second, we mounted the tent pole antenna mast to a steel gate piling at the edge of the Dripping Springs area. We were still completelylwithin the Organ Mountains National Monument for those keeping score.

A note about gates: I grew up in New Mexico. Almost every gate in the state has one or more parking spots next to it. It's just assumed that when the gate is closed, you'll park and walk in. I personally believe the parking spots are there because people tend to just park in front of the gate if there's not a space. We parked in the spot near the gate because we needed an antenna mount, but sure enough, about a minute after we'd started transmitting, the parak ranger turned up and closed the gate. If you're worried that we'd have been locked in, don't be. The out portion of the road was left open with a bar of those teeth that puncture your tires for going in instead of out rooted firmly in place.

Why all this talk of gates? Well, the gate was a part of our antenna structure. Go ahead, ask me how I know. OK, I'll tell you anyway.  The radio was chirping happily along right up until the ranger closed the gate. (The gate that turned out to be roughly five meters long, a quarter wavelength.) Then, the side tone dropped a few hundred hertz in tone and you could hear the radio struggling to transmit. Right after that, TouCan's internal Rockite's keyer rebooted: an indicator that almost all the RF was coming back down into the rig.


We'd started the activation with the counterpoise for the vertical running away from the gate and a parallel to the direction of the gate. Put another way, it was perpendicular to the right-hand side of the road we were sitting on and headed out into the desert away from the road. I detached the counterpoise altogether and the radio got better. It started transmitting again. Our signal strenghth, however, was lower than it had been a few moments before. I reattached the counterpoise and KO6BTY helped me run it back along the road away from the gate. We tried calling CQ with TouCans again. It's signal strength was back up and we were off and running.

View of Tortugas Mountain (aka A Mountain) from Dripping Springs

Park:

US-4551 near Dripping Springs is one of my least favorite places to hike in the entire state. It is replet with brambles for 100s of yards in most directions. Fortunately we didn't need to hike. We operated from the hood of the truck--ToCans has a wifi keyer run by our Chromebook--and took in the gorgeous sunset as we did. I'm looking forward to seeing the pictures KO6BTY took.

We definitely had to drive to this park. I suppose we could have come close via public transit and then hiked along the road, but we were also in a bit of a hurry as we had just about an hour to kill on a Sunday afternoon.

Radio Details:

This trip has been fun! I forgot our carbon fiber mast on the incoming plane and was a little  bit bummed that we might not get to operate at all, at least not with a vertical antenna. 

Here's the thing though, and I'll wrote far more about this in the east side of the Organs activation post. We were able to use our tent pole as a mast. without a hitch Yes, we used our metal tent pole. It worked so well!!!

QSO/RBN spot map:


Happenings of Interest 

The most interesting bit besides repeated calls from a callsign that doesn't seem to exist, VD5PRB, was seeing the resonance of the entire setup change when the gate was closed.

QSO Log

I wasn't able to record all of the QSOs on this one, but here are a sampling of seven of the total eleven QSOs that were made in under 28 minutes


Callsignrx RSTtx RSTTime (GMT)Frequency
w5keb339559 ar2024/12/22 00:12:0014057.4
wa6m559539 ca2024/12/22 00:13:0014057.4
w6csn329579 ca2024/12/22 00:13:0014057.4
wx7or559449 or2024/12/22 00:15:0014057.4
k6df579559 ca 2024/12/22 00:18:0014057.4
aa6rs559599 ca 2024/12/22 00:20:0014057.4
ad0sn339559 mn2024/12/22 00:24:0014057.4
w7dz449559 wa2024/12/22 00:31:0014057.4
na6jd559559 wa2024/12/22 00:37:0014057.4
nt6e579559 ca2024/12/22 00:39:0014057.4
n4caz449599 ca2024/12/22 00:40:0014057.4


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