Amateur Radio · VHF/UHF · Summits On The Air · Colorado Mountains · Adventure
For the June VHF contest, I operated Single-Op Portable from the summit of Pikes Peak. I combined this with Summits On The Air (SOTA) and Parks On The Air (POTA) activations. In a few hours, I made 80 QSOs on 6m, 2m, 1.25m, 70cm, and 23cm bands. It was a fun time. Quite a few … Read more
In May, we met up with our friends Paul/KF9EY and Beth/KB9DOU for a trip on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Joyce/K0JJW and I had been on the parkway before but had not completed the whole route. We all thought it would be a great trip to do together, in about a week, so we would not … Read more
Doing a simultaneous activation of a Summits On The Air (SOTA) summit and a Parks On The Air (POTA) park is becoming more common. There is a lot of crossover between the two programs. Here in Colorado, many of the SOTA peaks are in national forests or national parks, making them an ideal double activation. … Read more
In January 2021, I wrote about the North America Adventure Frequency (NAAF) which originated in the North America SOTA community. About a year later, how is this working out? Is anyone actually using it? A few key points to remember: The NAAF is 146.58 MHz. This frequency is in addition to, not a … Read more
I previously wrote about some of the tools I use for managing SOTA and POTA logs. See Tips and Tools for Managing Logs. I continue to learn about the file formats and various tricks for generating the logs. Some of this is not well-documented…at least I haven’t found it…so I am sharing what I’ve figured … Read more
When operating portable, I use Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries from Bioenno. Most of my portable operating is for Summits On The Air (SOTA) and I wrote about it here: My SOTA Battery Journey For POTA activations, I purchased a larger, 20 Ah Bioenno battery and use it to power a Yaesu FT-991 (and other radios). … Read more