POTA Camping at Angel Island State Park US-1123

Gaaackkkkk the AM broadcast interference!!!! Gaaasssspppppppp!

Still though, the POTA went really, really well and camping with the gang, (aged 14, 12, and 10), was a blast. We haven't camped in forever!

The Park

Angel Island State Park, US-1123, no surprise perhaps, is an island. It's just off the coast of San Francisco, Oakland, and Tiburon. It served a similar purpose to Ellis Island once upon a time.

Getting There

No surprise to anyone that regularly reads the blog, we, of course, took public transit to the island. The gang were carrying most of our camping gear.

We took BART downtown, had lunch at the Irish Bank, the Irish pub the gang grew up around over the last decade or so, and then hopped the ferry to Agnel Island. I stopped by The Palace on Montgomery and Market before meeting the gang on the way to the ferry terminal.

If you think you've seen that ceiling before in a certain movie with Michael Douglass, it's because you have. If you'd like to know what movie, ask me in the comments.

The ferry ride was, as usual, delightful. The gang got pretzels and I got a vodka tonic at the onboard bar.

Mota, (internet alias for the 12 year-old kid), spotted dolphins on the way out! I didn't get a picture but the ride was beautiful and picturesque all the same.

Once there, the ferry pulled away and it was a rougly half hour hike to our campsite.

The gang set up both their tent and mine. I set up the radio, and we had dinner from the Hawaiian BarBQ place we dropped by on the way to the ferry terminal. (Clearly, camping here is an arduous activity that teaches Grit. Snort.)

Here's the radio-wise view from the campsite out over the Bay.

That's Project TouCans and its quarter-wave vertical antenna electrical taped to the post.

Radio Details:

As usual, I was on our only portable rig, Project TouCans. It's a five Watt, rock-locked, kit built and then homebrewed rig you can read more about here.

The AM interference was truly a thing to behold. Wow! I'll hopefully post a few video QSLs from the outing, but... wow!

Here's an example of the RFI

I managed to pull in five QSOs before I stopped to eat dinner with the gang. I made two more QSOs before I started to doze off. That meant I had seven of the ten QSOs I needed with three AM stations blasting in the background. I was fairly amazed at that.

I woke up at 2:34 AM PST and decided to try to wrap up the POTA right then. You can see the rig-wise view from that late in the evening/morning at the start of this post. I made a few more QSOs, out to the Indiana, Georgia, and Louisiana. At that point, I hadn't realized it, but the park was activated!

The final operating windwo was at 7:40 PST the same morning. I made four more QSOs out to Illinois, East Bay via ground wave, Alabama, and the final QSO to Kansas.

QSO spot map:

If you run the time slider all the way to the left, you can see all the QSOs at once.

Happenings of Interest

We saw something we'd never seen before in the ionosphere! There was what looked like a vortex centered on the South Pole:

I'm checking it out, but no news yet.

The Trip Back

The next morning, we packed up and packed out back to the Angel Island Ferry Terminal.

The hike was pretty and mostly downhill on the way out.

Once back in town, we hit the Embarcadero BART Station, hopped off at Montgomery,

and then caught the 30 to the Buena Vista! Where we had breakfast including Irish Coffee for me. (Best 14 hour Spring Break trip ever!)

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