Antenna Testing at Ridley Creek

I built a new loading coil to use with my MFJ-1956 12-foot telescopic whip. This is a scaled-down version of the old one I had been using. But, more on that in a separate post. Anyway, I was dying to see how it worked, so I drove down to Ridley Creek State Park (K-1414, KFF-1414) to put it on the air. 

When I rolled into the parking lot, I was surprised to see a large military truck there. As I drove around the loop, I saw about a dozen soldiers in a field. Two of them were carrying a stretcher back into the woods. No, the park wasn’t under attack. It appeared to be some reservists going through a training exercise. 

I deployed the new antenna configuration in a minute or two. Before I got on the air, I hooked up my antenna analyzer to confirm that I could tune it up on each band from 40M through 17M. Success! I used a Sharpie® pen to mark the coil tap locations for each band. 

My rig today was my trusty TR-35 (5 watts). I started out on 40M: and, after spotting myself, the calls started rolling in. I made the requisite 10 contacts in about eight minutes. After making 23 contacts on 40M, I moved up to 20M.

There was also lots of action on 20M. One caller was W6LEN in California. It’s been a while since I worked Jess, so it was good to hear him again. Jess spotted me for the WWFF folks, and I soon started receiving calls from DX stations. I logged contacts with Puerto Rico, Italy, France, and Poland.

After exactly an hour of operating, I had 42 contacts, with four park-to-park contacts I’m aware of. Throwing in the DX contacts, this was one of the better activations I’ve had lately.

I’m hesitant to attribute today’s success to my shortened, base-loaded whip; but this thing seems to have some kind of mojo. I’ll do a separate post on the coil and how I put it together. 

73, Craig WB3GCK