Project TouCans Activates US-4751 Twice in Two Hours

US-4571 at City College San Francisco, around sunset is one of the best propagation spots in the city for Project TouCans and a Stick. I discovered this a few months back when I had a little time to kill before Cantonese class. Given, TouCans isn't quite as compact as a KH-1, but it's not much bigger than some people's water bottles, and therefore pretty easy to carry around for just-in-case POTA activations. I haven't made any calls to Europe or Sweden from this QTH yet, but I did wind up with two QSOs to Maine in my log from my latest afternoon POTA activation.

I hit the park, quite unintentionally, at the sweet spot for racking up activations. The first activation ran from about 2300 UTC till midnight. The second one started immediately afterwards and lasted about another hour.

Park Details:

Getting to the park is a piece of cake since it sits near five different transit routes, specifically, the 29, 43, 49, K-train, and the 8, not to mention the Balboa Park BART station. I generally walk down to the corner of Silver and Mission, grab a cup of coffee and a donut or eggroll, (or both), and then catch the 49 the rest of the way over to campus and the trail.

The campus is small and is perched above the Mission District, across a valley from our house and McLaren Park. It's this perch that makes propagation from there so good. The launch angle of the antenna is lowered, (as a rule of thumb), by a degree for every degree of steepness that the hill the antenna sits on rolls away from it. The next video shows a bit more about the 49 bus and campus. (As a note, I was still learning how to set the exposure level on the new camera, hence the darkness of these videos, and the fact that there are so many videos... I needed the practice.)

The walk across campus to the trail is really, really short and also—for San Francisco anyway—hill free. Campus is beautiful. The grass is green there are conifers everywhere and the science building has a pretty spiffy looking antenna tower up top.

Radio Details:

I was still using our two-person Kelty tent's support pole for a vertical mast on this one. It worked great although, with its extra weight, it was a little more work to stabilize into the tree. I also made use of something we learned about counterpoises while in New Mexico. I spread the counterpoise out a bit in the direction of propagation I was hoping for: off to the East in this case. Here in San Francisco, especially off of piers, the counterpoise gives the best results when it is coiled up and very near to the radio. In New Mexico, we discovered that on the much dryer ground, the rig did not enjoy having a coiled counterpoise at all. Instead, propagation was better with the counterpoise extended. For this activation, after a while, I draped the counterpoise off the edge of the terraced sidewalk and planter bed I was operating from.

This video shows the entire Project TouCans and a Stick setup process

QSO/RBN spot map:

Here's the animated QSO map for the first activation on 2024/12/27

Here's the animated QSO map for the second activation on 2024/12/28

Happenings of Interest

POTA activations in town have their own set of perks. The park is on the route by my favorite Philly Chesses Steak spots in the city. I stopped by for a beer while waiting on my why home while waiting to change buses from the 43 to the 54.

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Copasetic Flow

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