US Islands Awards Program

K3USI/rover 2011 W/VE Island QSO Party VA018R & VA020R NS4J Op. Oct. 2011

The October W/VE Island QSO Party has been tough for me to take part in. Most every event falls on my wedding anniversary weekend. I managed to get a pass for the 2011 event and did a Rover operation close to home on the Rappahannock River.

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Crossing the concrete dam over to my operating position on Ficklen Island, VA018R.

My operating position.
My operating position.

 

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Looking up river from the dam. Ficklen is on the right.

It took me about 45 minutes to get my Inverted L up in the trees near my position but it was well worth the trouble. I got some great signal reports on the TX side and it seemed to hear much better than my go to 16′ vertical. With my SGC-231 I was able to tune 80, 20, 15 and 10.
I made 75 QSOs in 2 hours and 45 minutes. Coolest QSO was with a QRP SOTA station on 10 meters. He was on Pikes Peak in CO at 14,110 feet.

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I did have a high noise level from these power lines.


VA020R Fall Hill, left, on Sunday was a real challenge to wade to through the Rappahannock River. Carrying my Pelcan case of equipment and a 33 Ah, 24# battery, chair and 2 collaspsible poles worked up quite a sweat.


This island isn’t visited so the underbrush was quite thick. I was lucky I didn’t run into any Poison Ivy.

 


Tough, but you can just see the 32′ pole holding the far end of my Inverted L. I had 41 QSOs in 1:25 of operating time.

Check out the Youtube video of my Rappahannock River crossing. I think I counted 10 crossings all together. Next time I will reevaluate my risk and reward of spending more time on setup and teardown then on operation. It was still fun. Now all I have to do is figure out why the SGC wouldn’t tune on 40 meters.