Paul Butzi

Stillwater State Wildlife Area is just a few miles from my home as the crow flies, and only a 15 minute drive.

As I’ve progressed down my portable operating journey, my portable operating has become more and more CW centric, which has put a certain focus on finding portable paddles I like.

Parks on the Air is the gateway drug to amateur radio field operating.

For a while US-3216 was the closest POTA park to my home, and I’ve activated it more than two dozen times, earning a Kilo award in the process.

Two of the essentials for portable operating (well, actually, for any operating, but…) are an antenna to radiate your signal and capture signals you want to receive, and feedline to get signals between your transceiver and the antenna.

As I’ve expanded my field operating experience, I’ve acquired a number of items which, while not strictly radio related, are nevertheless great additions to my POTA activation activities.

Power for portable radio operating can come from a variety of sources, in a wide variety of power levels and overall capacity.

In the POTA Discord, Charlie N4IIT asked A bit off topic, but I’d love to hear more about how you think about the QRP skill set.

Now that I have my new Yaesu FT-891 mostly sorted, I’ve been putting together a POTA/field kit, roughly based on the field kit I had put together for the Xiegu G90, which is now, to use the currently fashionable phrase, deprecated.

My recent purchased Yaesu FT-891 came, as all spanking new Yaesu FT-891’s do, with a four contact Molex style power connector, the male side of the connector pair connected to a pointlessly long 12 AWG power cord fitted with fuses in both the positive and…

POTA activations and the Politics of Power It’s worth a little thinking about how boosting your transmit power affects a POTA activation.

Eager to get my ‘parks activated’ count up to 30 for the next arbitrary award level on the POTA website, I headed up to Larrabee SP, the first state park in the state.

On 12/15, decent weather tempted me out to try for two activations - Lake Sammamish SP (US-3216), followed by Palouse to Cascades Trail (US-3203).

Looking at my stats on the POTA website, I saw that I need three new activations to hit the next level of activator award.

As the weather turns less pleasant, my willingness to activate new parks diminishes, because I often have very little idea if I will be able to find shelter from the rain.

After our Big Windstorm, I had tried to do an activation of Lake Sammamish State Park and arrived at the park to find, to my horror, all the gates locked.

Having narrowly avoided a ‘invalid’ activation attempt at Lake Sammamish SP when I inadvertently had a QSO fall into a new UTC day, I was feeling a need to redeem my failed activation at Marckworth SF which is just a short distance from my home, by getting

A week of looking around for another set of parks that would give me an opportunity to do two parks in one day left me at the end of the week having done no activations and with no real plan.

I made my very first POTA QSO on October 4, 2023.

With the itch to get out and do an activation growing, and a Friday with no commitments scheduled, I started eyeing the POTA map looking for promising opportunities that might require only a modest drive.

One of my goals is to activate more different parks.

I’m an inveterate optimizer.

As we head deeper into autumn here in the PNW the weather can only get colder and rainier until spring.

On Oct 14, I was champing at the bit to do an activation, despite a sort of wet weather forecast.

Despite the dour outlook of various propagation prediction tools and reports of cruddy band conditions I was eager to get back to doing activations after my long hiatus while we traveled in Egypt and Jordan.

Presented with the possibility of a clear schedule in the afternoon I cleverly packed the day’s vital tasks into the AM with a goal of sloping off for a very relaxed afternoon enjoying the beautiful weather (clear skies, temps in the low 80’s F, and a gen…

My recent struggles during POTA activations have had me thinking hard about QRP, activations, and antennas, specifically antennas for POTA park activations.

The weather has been wonderful and with pleasant temps and a day free I resolved to head out for a POTA activation or two.

Propagation conditions continue to be crummy but I am resolved to continue to do activations anyway.

Notwithstanding crappy band condx, today was POTA day.

Today I did a very exciting (well, exciting to me) POTA activation at Lake Sammamish State Park (US-3216).