On the last day of a week-long trip to Central Pennsylvania to see my new granddaughter, I took a quick side trip to scout out the trailhead for the Northwest Lancaster County River Trail. This trail is on the list of trails I want to explore by bike this year. While I was out there I did a little QRP-portable operating (of course).
The Northwest Lancaster County River Trail is a 14-mile trail that ends at the Falmouth Boat Launch near Bainbridge, PA. From my parking spot at the boat launch, I had a wide view of the scenic Susquehanna River. This spot is just a couple miles downstream from the infamous Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station.
Since it was a dreary, rainy day (but better than the snow we had yesterday), I set up my 19-ft Vertical on the back of the truck and operated my KX3 from the cab of the truck. With Three Mile Island up the river and another power plant directly across the river, I thought it would be a noisy location. As it turned out, it was surprisingly quiet. My only issue today was some heavy, weather-related QRN on 40M.
I’m only 1 contact away from reaching the SKCC Tribune x 5 award, so I once again focused on making SKCC contacts. Being a Tuesday afternoon, there wasn’t a whole lot of SKCC activity. I still made some interesting SKCC contacts, though. I worked two mobile stations from Ohio on 40 meters, WJ8Y and KD8ZM. KD8ZM was operating while driving. I was impressed! I also worked Hal K7SAX in Oregon. Hal’s signal was so strong, I had to quickly reach for the volume control on the KX3. Hal gave me a 569 and said I had an “amazing signal for QRP.” That was very nice to hear from a West Coast station.
It started raining heavily again, so I quickly took down the antenna and packed up. I ended up with 6 SKCC contacts but, unfortunately, none of them counted towards my Tx5 award. The quest for that final contact goes on.
I’m looking forward to bringing my bike along on a future visit and exploring the trail along the river. I’m sure there will be some QRP-portable operating from somewhere along the trail.
73, Craig WB3GCK
WB3GCK QRP Amateur Radio 