My great friend and radio buddy Bob WV7W and I were starting to feel oppressed by the dark, cold winter and wanted to get out and work some POTA. We planned up a trip to Hanford Reach National Monument to try our first joint activation. It was only a partial success. We had endured a series of snow days and single-digit low temperatures, but at our QTH the snow was mostly gone, temps were in the high 30s, and the skies were clear. Hanford Reach is about a 45 minute drive for us, so we loaded our gear and headed out.
Conditions changed rapidly as we drove north. We encountered fog, the temperatures dropped, and the snow was emphatically not melted. The maps for Hanford Reach on the US Fish & Wildlife Service web page reveal a huge area, but the pin on the POTA website is conveniently placed at a rest stop which seemed like a convenient place to set up and play radio. My coffee drinking habits make a proximal head a welcome convenience and we knew there would be plenty of grassy areas to deploy antennas.
Our plan was to operate from the cab of my pickup and on different bands. I would operate on 20m. I was running 100w and brought along my IC-7300 and set up my Chameleon whip to the left of the truck, laying the radials right on the snow. I made myself a makeshift desk from the top of the plastic tote I use to transport my gear. Bob was going QRP and had a much smaller footprint than I did. He set up a Ham Stick for 17m going into his KX2 mounted on a nifty knee board bracket he designed and 3d printed himself.
We had imagined that we would be able to operate concurrently on different bands. That turned out not to be the case at all. Being so close to each other, whenever one of us keyed the transmitted we swamped the other’s receiver, even with a power of only 5w. That was the first lesson learned.
At 100 watts, I had little trouble making contacts and had made 21 contacts at a rate of about one per minute, my normal rate when things are clicking. When I got a break in the action, I stopped so Bob could operate. For whatever reason, Bob got completely skunked. We don’t know if it was the band or the location, he never did get a reply to his CQs even though we verified that he had been spotted. I felt worse about it than he did, and with the cold, miserable conditions we decided to call it a day faster than we normally would.