Thomas Does Radio or Something

With all the prep done over in the other post and acceptable weather, of course I had to actually take on the adventure. My drive out to K-1441 Blue Mound State Park ( wiki ) was a little on the late side. Stopping in Verona on the way over to acquire some fast food to maintain energy through the event also put me a bit further behind schedule. Soon enough, I arrived at the middle altitude parking lot of the park to hike the rest of the way to summit W9/WI-010 all in Iowa county. Only a bit into the 1800Z March 13th start, but there's still setup and making contacts to happen. View up the trail from just above the parking lot to reach the East Tower on the summit

Since writing and handling pictures is falling behind on my activations, here's the park wiki content I've actually created recently from visiting new parks: Cross Plains State Park ( K-1448 , KFF-1448 ) Governor Nelson State Park ( K-1452 , KFF-1452 ) New Glarus Woods State Park ( K-1467 , KFF-1467 ) Ice Age Trail ( K-4238 , KFF-4238 ) Blue Mound State Park ( K-1441 , KFF-1441 ) Log submission to each program may still be pending… Maybe not the ideal priority, but getting something done.

With a vacation day on Friday, 4 March 2022, (ahead of the Destiny 2 raid launch) I decided to try some late shift antenna experimentation and try to get an activation in at K-1452 , Governor Nelson State Park ( wiki ). Playing with wire and transformers on inappropriate mix toroids in the dark didn't pan out (as expected of the effort) so the late shift didn't pan out with only 4 contacts on 20m. So I resolved to go back in daylight with more antenna capabilities.

Here's a quick, low-effort post for the day. I got this XGGCOMM digital mode adapter for Yaesu with my FT-818nd when I purchased the package from another ham. It's rather inconvenient because it does audio out/in as analog while CAT is a USB to serial chip. If I had a home station and a desktop setup for my digital modes, it'd be fine. For field use, I sure don't want to haul this, and a USB sound card, around.

It's already the start of the UTC day for the Wisconsin QSO Party (March 13, 2022 - 1800Z to 0100Z March 14) and my plans are kinda in place. With proven antenna capabilities on 40m and 20m (blog post of that POTA activation still in the backlog) that should probably also give me 15m with more tuner help, plus 6/2/70 FM capability, that should give me enough to work with. Since there's a perfectly reasonable time constraint on the contest, planning to operate portable for the whole thing is probably within my capabilities. So, what's the plan? Destination: K-1441 Blue Mound State Park ( wiki ) containing summit W9/WI-010 . Summit summary from sotl.as, map content from Open Street Map contributors

It was a nice day in Wisconsin and, having taken Friday the 25th off for video gaming, it was a nice change of pace to throw in some POTA in a new location on Sunday the 28th. The actual intention was getting to K-1459 Lake Kegonsa State Park ( wiki ), which I definitely managed to do. I'll get to the RaDAR in a bit. On the way out of town, I stopped by Bagels Forever, a local bagel factory with walk-in service counter serving a full selection of options. I chose my standard sausage-egg-and-cheese, gouda, on sesame with two additional cold plain bagels since they were out of chocolate chip and bagel sticks. These are key to getting set up! Getting setup on a picnic table at the snowy Williams Knoll as the bench dries out

It was a great day out, we had gone scouting the park the day before, and I was on vacation to use up my remaining balance before my time resets next month. Wasn't quite above freezing, but my experience with Winter Field Day said that I had enough of a setup to definitely get on the air. It was off to Governor Nelson State Park ( wiki ), K-1452 in Waunakee, WI (Dane county) at EN53gd. I was hoping that there would be park staff to exchange our kiosk receipt for a real window sticker, but it was too late in the day when I got there, it seems. Easy enough to put the ticket on the dash and head to the parking nearest the lake. Wire for 20m on fiberglass pole set up in the dying light at Governor Nelson picnic bench just before getting started. The orange wire spilling from my backpack was a thought at trying 10m, but with less than two hours before Late Shift started, it was my priority to get the 14th activated rather than playing around with new wire configurations.

People have been making UART cloning interfaces for the single-pin serial on TRRS 3.5 mm plug to Yaesu radios like the VX-2 for years. Unfortunately, those years mean that many people were making RS-232 to TTL converters and waxing poetic about using two or more transistors to implement the level shifting between the ±5 V or more interface and 3.3 V for the radio. Heck, some even implemented a whole zener and PNP linear regulator to ensure a safe pull-up voltage was presented to the radio. But wait, we've got chips that go from USB to right where we need the signal levels… (Styled as a recipe blog post; skip to the end for the ingredients and assembly steps after the story)

This year, I finally had the station and wherewithal to operate Winter Field Day 2022 representing Four Lakes ARC . I had other priorities on Saturday, but Sunday was just a matter of getting started early enough. Waking up, showering, gathering the station components, and transport to the local park I had in mind left me with barely two hours of the event remaining. Arriving at the scenic overlook of Madison's Hoyt Park before the rotating groups of, ah, recreational smokers, started happening gave me easy access to the benches in the park to be my operating position. Blanket on a bench with my backpack, radio carrying case, and red clipboard for paper logging. First operational use of my tripod and jackite pole wire antenna in the background. No question about it, this is a 1 Oscar station; no walls to separate me and my one radio from the outdoors!

After a very long break from successful HF operation (and the front end of a pandemic), I made it back on the radio with successful contacts. Outside is a G5RV Jr (borrowed from a fellow FLARC member) hung barely high enough in a tree. Inside is my kit with tuner: FT-818nd, Z-817, and a Bioenno 12V/4.5AH LiFePO. Logging is pen and a little notebook. FT-818 with Z-817 to its right, the microphone dangling down the front of the wooden drawers, and the logbook in the foreground on top of an unweathered bird box.