Back at Chino Hills State Park

With a few spare hours on Sunday morning, August 11th, I decided to make a quick run into Chino Hills State Park (US-1139) to see if the band conditions had improved. CHSP is an interesting park with a great network of trails, but most of them have little to no shade and aren’t ideal for POTA activations. While most of the shady areas sit at the bottom of canyons with challenging RF geology, there is one covered picnic area at the top of a small hill that works out pretty. Fortunately, that picnic spot was free and I was able to claim it for a few hours.

The setup for today consisted of my QRP TX-500 transceiver, BaMaKey TP-III paddles, and Chelegance MC-750 vertical on a tripod. After trying, selling and/or trading several other QRP transceivers over the past few years (ICOM 705, Mountain Topper MTR-4B, and Penntek TR45-L Skinny) I’m happy that I’ve ended up with the Lab599 TX-500. It’s smaller and not as complicated as the IC-705 yet has more functionality than the MTR and the TR45-L. The filtering and DSP come in handy and the audio sounds great.

I was fortunate to find a good deal on a 5.11 LVC8 Sling Bag that perfectly fits the radio, microphone, battery, cables, coax, notepads, and even my RigExpert antenna analyzer. It’s a handy kit and everything is protected and safe.

The bands were much more forgiving today, and I was able to complete the activation just by hunting the POTA Spots page on both CW and SSB. In the end I collected 11 contacts from across the country. Not bad for 10w on a vertical!