I had long wanted to activate for the John Moyle Memorial Field Day from a park.
I wanted to find a spot with a good takeoff that wasn’t too far from home.
Previously I’d activated VKFF-0056 from Somersby Falls, and while that was a nice spot and propagation was OK, it really was down in a hollow.
I pulled out Google Earth to have a look at other parts of this enormous park. There is a lovely lookout further down Way Way Road that would have been brilliant, except that it’s actually an island of non-park inside the park boundaries.
Heading back towards Kariong I found a small dirt road (Bulgandry Rd) that headed in to the park and had a nice large car park area.
Interestingly it’s only a little over 2km from the Central Coast Amateur Radio Club’s clubhouse.
The Drive
I had planned to be set up well before the contest started (01:00UTC or midday local time). I didn’t end up arriving until a bit after 12:30pm local time; heading out through Warnervale, then south down the M1 to the Kariong exit.
Driving along Way Way Road along the ridge until I got to Bulgandry Road
The second entrance is a nicer bit of road (I took the other leaving and it would have been better going the other way).
The walk leads up to the Bulgandry Aborignal Art site.
Google Earth
Definitely inside the park boundaries.
Zoming out a little places the location in to context. If you look a little further south down Way Way Road you can see the bump excluding the lookout that I previously mentioned.
Brisbane water is a pretty large part of the Central Coast.
The Setup
Remembering to capture the park sign at the entrance.
It was still raining (after a heavy downpour overnight), so I decided to operate from inside the car, setting up the pole in front of the me.
I ended up running the southern (centre conductor) side of the dipole across the car park over this branch. Predictable, before I got it in the air I had someone drive in so I had to race over and lift the wire up so they cold drive under it.
Not my tidiest setup.
The firsts for this activation:
- The power pole kit from Waverly ARC that I bought at the Wyong field day and assembled. I particularly like having the voltmeter on it.
- A linear amplifier. I’ve had this amp almost since the time I was first licensed in 1980 and never used it. During the week I put some 45A Anderson connectors on it. While it will only draw up to 22A, the 30A connectors were still too small for the wires on the unit. Set up to take 4A in (and dropping the power out on the FT-818), I could select 25W, 50W or 100W.
The Activation
Starting on 40m, I made my first contact at 1:52 UTC (12:52pm local).
Also started running without the linear only turning it on occasionally if I couldn’t get a contact. After a bit I just kept it on 25W and then 50W.
Just before the second block started I managed to set up being the caller on a particular frequency and got a decent number of contacts over the following 45 minutes until another operator decided to start calling on that frequency regardless of myself and a number of other operators telling him that the frequency was in use, necessitating another move on my part. The person in question was operating from home, so I suspect that even though he was putting out a decent signal he was dealing with a lot of local noise and didn’t hear any of us. I actually tried a few more times through the afternoon ( he was on that frequency for a couple of hours) to contact him, even with 100W, unsuccessfully.
There were a few other park operators out as we’ll that I managed to get in the log, including Gerard VK2IO, who was relatively close in Iron Bark Picnic Area in Popran National Park and Mike VK6MB/3 in Gippsland Lakes Coastal Park.
Dropped down to 80m and picked up a few there, including the first time I’ve actually managed to speak to my dad on HF in a very long time. He was part of the Redcliffe Club’s activation under VK4IZ.
Later in the afternoon I was visited by Bob VK2AOR and Brad VK2NMZ and lost track of time chatting. I got back on to the radio and made two more contacts on 80m before I hit my six hours.
As an aside, if I’d had some lighting with me to help backup in the dark, I would have been tempted to just operate into the night as 20m was just starting to open up really well in to Europe.
This is all the wire & rope parts of my antenna laid out before I packed them up.
All up I made 71 contacts gaining 142 points (as I was portable) in the contest.
The Stats
Running my park activation checker over the logs
#033 duplicate detected - 20190316 042532 VK3ZPF/P 40M SSB #035 duplicate detected - 20190316 042730 VK2WG 40M SSB #040 duplicate detected - 20190316 043830 VK4ADC 40M SSB #048 duplicate detected - 20190316 050344 VK4SN 40M SSB #056 duplicate detected - 20190316 055310 VK3CNE 40M SSB #057 duplicate detected - 20190316 055811 VK4IZ 40M SSB #070 duplicate detected - 20190316 075251 VK2IY 80M SSB Modes SSB: 71 Parks VKFF-0620: 1 VKFF-0115: 1 VKFF-1046: 1 VKFF-0402: 1 VKFF-0417: 3 VKFF-0666: 1 VKFF-0747: 1 VKFF-2101: 3 12 park contacts - 8 unique Bands 40M: 60 80M: 11 64 unique contacts (7 duplicates) 71 log entries
So as far as a park activation went I made 64 contacts. If I hadn’t already qualified this park I would have with this activation. While I have previously activated this park three times, for t he boomerang award it only counts twice as there was a consecutive day activation.
All up I had a very enjoyable day. It stopped raining once I started the activation and stayed overcast but dry for the remainder of the day.
I finished packup and headed off by about 7:20pm.
vk2mg 