Urban POTA in Downtown San Francisco, So Many Buildings, So Many RF Obstacles, and So Much Fun!

 I found a new operating location in downtown San Francisco that combines the Butterfield National Historic Trail and the Pony Express National Historic Trail and was so much fun! To be clear, I don't know if I'll ever activate either park from this spot, but wow, the architecture! And! Wow! The RF propagation curiousities!

I had the TransAmerica Pyramid on one side of me 

and the building formerly known as the Alcoa building on the other

My operating position was from the Maritime Plaza, an elevated park smack in the middle of the Embarcadero. Take a look at the Cesium Map using Google PhotoRealistic tiles below to get a good feel for the whole area. (I'll keep you posted, but for the moment, you'll have to dial in the map yourself, I haven't had time to standardize my saved view code to all of my maps yet.

I wound up making a whole series of videos just getting to the site. You can see them in the playlist below.

Here's the cool thing that got me back to my roots—RF engineering—my first QSO was with AL7KC in Alaska. Yes faithful reader, I know I've contacted him before, but this time, there was a high rise in the way across the street. It did not matter! I've spent time doing RF propagation maps with GPT-5 this week. You'll see one of them overlaid on my transmitting site below. The next two QSOs were to Washington right along the edge of the same building, and I received a 599 in each signal report. That's a 599 to Washington from SF with a five watt rig!

All the QSOs at once

The Local View

Videos

Animated map of QSOs