Another Run at Governor Nelson, Now With a Dipole

Catching up on the blog by going straight from activation to post! Despite the solar storms today, the Kp dropped a bit to 4-5 for my targeted 21-24Z on 2022-09-04. Allegedly the band conditions would be bad, but I found them quite usable. If anything, I had more success than some other trips. Most notably, I had a QRP hunter call back and give a 59 with a 59 deserved in response; 5W each way! Don't necessarily believe the predictions; your presence with a rig contributes to the bands being less dead!

Anyway, the point of this trip to Governor Nelson State Park (K-1452, wiki) was to make use of my 20m QRP dipole that I constructed earlier in the summer. Supporting it today was my 26' jackite telescoping fiberglass pole, also a more recent addition to my activating equipment.

Operating point under cloudy skies, setup at a park picnic table with the dipole mostly N-S aligned. Inverted-V goes off to the table to the north and to a tree to the south.

I tuned up the dipole on a different trip with different support structures that I used to hunt some parks. Since I'm already carrying the nanoVNA, might as well double check the tuning.

20m dipole at 26' as inverted-V with 25' of RG-316 down to the table: minimum SWR 1.27 at 14.45 MHz with 5 MHz span.

Looks quite reasonable. I'm operating QRP SSB for POTA, so optimized for just over the high end of the band (oops, too much trimming) is acceptable. Maybe I can get a few 10kHz's back by changing the end insulation arrangement connecting to the lines to supports. My FT-818 didn't complain (indicate much on the SWR meter) with the direct coax connection.

I operated from setup around 2130Z up until the day turnover. There was some good listening and hunted P2P, ending with 21 QSOs (including activators doing simultaneous activations). Furthest heard was probably Brazil and contacts to Washington/Oregon and Puerto Rico.

Not having band agility was a bit disappointing, but also most other activations were on 20 and 40 for the consistency of hunters, I'd expect. If conditions were too gross, I did have my 28.5' speaker wire to fall back on, but that comes with lower efficiency and a tuner (packed, but unused). Will definitely keep using that, but will also see about these relatively low altitude dipoles for the future.