My brother Andy, KK4LWR, and I decided to do a quick activation of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park the day after Christmas as we were both in Cleveland visiting our parents for the holiday. My goal was to test out my FT-817, QBV 20/40m vertical antenna, and my laptop ahead of my trip to Turks and Caicos Island later in January with some FT8 operation. Although I’ve had several FT-817s over the years, this one was purchased recently mainly for satellites and already went through a repair of the antenna relay. I also had not used the QBV antenna on the air at all yet, so I just wanted to shake everything down. My brother brought his QMX and a linked EFHW he built for his setup. We set up next to the Brecksville train station in the park on some picnic tables which was a nice spot with plenty of room.
While Andy quickly racked up the contacts to a successful activation, I was battling with a couple issues. First off, my FT-817’s issue with the antenna relay not switching came back despite my previous replacement of that relay. I have no idea how this occurred. After swapping the relay, I tested the radios numerous times and it was fine. I haven’t really used the radio much in the meantime either. But sure enough, when I tried it on this day, changing the antenna setting from front to rear did absolutely nothing. Luckily Andy brough an extra BNC to PL-259 adapter that saved the day for me.
The next issue was with the QBV antenna, while a fun kit and cool idea, is a tough antenna to tune without an antenna tuner. Andy brought his which I used, but it required a lot of back and forth tweaking the whip length. This quickly made it obvious that this antenna is not a good choice to my trip to Turks and Caicos as carrying an antenna analyzer and messing around with the antenna extensively was not in the baggage or time plan. Additionally, I know I may be operating off my patio area which will have a lot of interaction with the building making tuning even more difficult.
Finally, I had some weird issues with WSJT-X where it would kick off the monitoring function randomly so nothing was decoding. It would seemingly do this after a decoding cycle or two whether I transmitted or not. I eventually upgraded to a new version of WSJT-X with the help of my phone hotspot, but it was quite annoying as this version of WSJT-X worked fine for me earlier in 2024. I did eventually get to 13 contacts, three of which were FM via 2m, 1.25m, and 70cm to Andy. Of the FT8 contacts, one was on 40m and nine were on 20m.
While it was only a quick and dirty activation that ultimately proved successful from a POTA point of view, it was frustrating. I’m glad I did this to help figure out some of my equipment for my upcoming trip. I ended up purchasing a different FT-817 that is fully functional (fingers crossed it stays that way) and selling the cursed one for a good price to a ham who did not need the BNC port capabilities. Instead of the QBV antenna, I am just going to bring my 4S Tuner from the Four State QRP Group and some wire and cord to string it up. I still plan to focus on satellites for the trip but this will at least let me hop on FT8 easily. A positive outcome of this test is that I used an USB C PD battery to power my station without problem. I’ve had this battery bank for quite awhile, and it functioned well with a 15V trigger adapter (Amazon Affiliate link to an example trigger adapter). I had concerns of RFI from the switching circuitry in there, but I had no issues on HF at all with that.