Dork Patrol Near the Pen! POTA Chaos Ensues!

Alright, alright, settle down you frequency freaks! Your favorite trio of radio rebels – that’d be yours truly (Dave, W4DVE), the Vertical Viking (Alex, K7ALO), and the End-Fed Enigma (Britt, K7BDB) – recently embarked on a POTA adventure that was, shall we say, memorable. Forget your pristine park benches and perfectly manicured operating positions; we took the dork mobile to the rugged hills just spitting distance from that old correctional facility they finally shut down. You could practically hear the echoes of Morse code from disgruntled inmates… or maybe that was just Alex tuning his rig.

First off, let’s talk about my antenna situation. Bless my heart, I’ve got ingenuity, I’ll give myself that. I whip out this end-fed wire contraption that looked like it escaped from a fishing tackle explosion. The thing was supposed to be supported by a tree, naturally. Did it go smoothly? Absolutely not! Picture this: me, flinging a bright orange rope (seriously, safety orange against a forest backdrop? Stealth mode: initiated!) over a branch, only for it to get hopelessly snagged like a squirrel in a bird feeder. After ten minutes of tugging and some truly impressive foliage redistribution, the wire was…somewhat… aloft, with a good twenty feet of that obnoxious orange line permanently enshrined in the canopy. Future hikers, you’re welcome for the trail marker!

Meanwhile, Alex, ever the purist (of sorts), deployed his ground-mounted vertical. Now, when I say “ground-mounted,” I mean ground-mounted. Picture a metal stick poking defiantly out of the dirt like a stubborn weed. Did it work? Surprisingly, yeah, Alex was pulling in contacts like he was ordering pizza. Efficiency in its most basic, dirt-hugging form.

And then there was Britt’s masterpiece. His homebrew end-fed, lovingly crafted with… well, let’s just say “various bits of wire and connectors he found in a drawer.” The pièce de résistance? The counterpoise wires. Plural. I’m talking a veritable octopus of radials splayed out across the underbrush. Picture it: a tangle of wires resembling metallic tentacles reaching out to the RF gods. I swear I saw a few squirrels give them a wide berth. Did it radiate? Enough to snag some decent contacts, including a park ranger who sounded deeply unimpressed with our presence so close to the former “Big House.”

The airwaves were alive with the sound of our glorious (and occasionally slightly off-frequency) signals. We battled QRM, swapped tall tales with fellow POTA enthusiasts, and collectively marveled at the sheer improbability of our cobbled-together stations actually working.

Did we make a clean getaway? Mostly. I may or may not have left a small offering of electrical tape at the base of my chosen tree, and I’m pretty sure Alex’s vertical is now slightly magnetized from the sheer intensity of his transmissions. As for Britt, well, his counterpoise tentacles might still be slightly entangled with some unfortunate ferns.

All in all, another successful (and utterly dorky) POTA activation in the books! Stay tuned for our next adventure, where we’ll probably try to use a weather balloon to lift an antenna made of coat hangers. You know you don’t want to miss it!

73 and watch out for orange rope in the trees!