KD7SWP Linn County Expedition for the
7th Area QSO Party, May 3, 2008

Lacking known operations in Linn County, K4XU (Dick Frey) asked if I'd be interested in camping out and operating from the woods again this year. I'd skipped last year, on account of Lisa being about to deliver our baby, and the year before, well, it didn't go so well due to antenna tuning, and band issues.

I managed to convince Fred to come out camping in the woods, which was a very good thing. I'm scared of the dark in the woods alone. And Fred tends to be much more prepared for anything woods related.

We had lots of late spring snow this year, so Fred built up a sled, and we rented snowshoes. Our plan was to drive up to where the snow started, then drag the sled in 'till we found a good spot to camp. Well, the snow started right off the highway. Good thing we had the sled, or we'd have been camping right there. We'd hoped to camp at the trail head 4 or 5 miles up at the end of Pamelia Rd, but that was looking rather unlikely by about the second step.

Loaded with a fairly good size tent, packs, food, water, radio gear and antenna, the sled felt like 125 pounds.. Decent on flats, easy down hill, total ass-kicker to pull up hill. Must be related to my bicycle. The worst was that where larger trees provided more shelter for the road, we ran into huge bare patches. We wore the base off the old skis in a few spots dragging it over bare pavement.

We'd had enough when we got up about two miles, right before Pamelia Rd. crosses Red Creek. We ditched the sled and snowshoes, and hauled everything else up a 20ft embankment, found a reasonably level spot to camp, and a couple big trees to throw an antenna in. I'd just got an old salmon pole and spinning reel courtesy of Craigslist.. that and a tennis ball did the trick pretty good. We set up camp and the DXEE antenna, about 50ft up in the trees. The DXEE is a fan dipole, with end loading coils to shorten the 40m section. We fed this with a 75ft long RG8X line, with an LDG Z-100 tuner and the K2 radio. The tuner was critical because the DXEE seems very narrow band. Also the tuner allowed us to load it up on 80m.. although I'm sure the feed line was involved.

Friday night, the 40m band was good enough for clear communication with K6WAZ, W6MCD, Southern California, and W6NIN, operating out of Hawaii. They were surprised we were only 10W and thought we'd do pretty good the next day if the antenna was performing that well.

The 7qp started at 6AM and ran to 12 midnight PST. Unfortunately we slept in till 8.. probably because the trip up was such a haul. When I did get the radio up and running, I could hear a lot, but just not really get out. I wish I'd been up at 6 because I'll bet 40 was working better then.

I only worked 6 contacts until about 1700PST.. mostly on 20m. During the day, Fred snowshoed back to the car, drove into Detroit to call up his wife and explained we were spending another night out there. When he got back, we decided to move the tent down to the snow covered road... Of course, it starts raining as we're moving the tent. Then we find the feed line is not long enough to hit the tent from the trees.. we had to drop the antenna down a 10 feet, and when I looked on Sunday morning, we actually wound up with an inverted V with a 90 degree corner. It wasvery nice to be able to operate from inside the tent as night fell.

Saturday afternoon, maybe about 6pm, things started to pick up on 40m. Still no local contacts, but I picked up another 10 or so. A little later, 80m started working... and I did get a few in-state contacts. Luckily the antenna tuner would tune some part of our antenna and feed line for 80m, but I really wish we'd had a full length dipole.

We heard probably 4 times more stations than we could successfully contact. The low noise conditions in the woods probably contributed to this, but I think we'd have been much more successful had we had 100W to put into the antenna. So... I have to make a decision at this point whether I want to spring to the 100W kit on the K2.. I think it would make it much more useful for real communications, but I'm not sure I'd be using it that much.

I don't know if anyone else operated out of Linn County.. if they did, it's very unlikely we'll have the "most contacts in county." I do think there should be an award for "most physical effort per contact," which I would hope the sled pull would put us in the running for.

Fred pulling the Sled	KD7SWP (Alex) operating from tent