First Time Calling CQ on CW

I made my first CW contacts hunting POTA in November 2023. Since then I have continued to make POTA hunting CW contacts at each activation, but have never activated with CW by calling CQ.

The reason for this is simple: it's MUCH more difficult to call CQ and have unknown callsigns sent to you in quick succession rather than slowly and intentionally hunting contacts that have already been spotted on the POTA page.

On Saturday, August 17th I made the trip up the hill to Angeles National Forest (US-4453) with the plan to activate entirely CW and potentially call CQ with CW for the first time. After hunting a handful of stations from the spotting page, I bit the bullet and threw out a few timid CQ calls. To limit the possibility of a call-sign pileup I limited myself to 5W output and didn't spot myself on the POTA page, instead relying on the hunters to stumble across my activation accidentally.

Eventually a few hunters found my call and responded. As I suspected, it was a whole different challenge to decipher the incoming call signs in realtime. I found myself copying the first few characters and then needing to ask again (at least once) for the remainder of the call. Fortunately all of the hunters were patient with me and I managed to copy all of the callsigns in the end.

For this activation, I brought out the QRP TX-500 transceiver, my BaMaTech TP-III CW key, and my linked EFHW. As there are no appropriate trees at the activation point, I chose to use my telescoping mast and drive-on mast base, both of which work very well for situations when I want to use a wire antenna without trees.

Whenever I bring out the mast, I tend to bring along my "antenna box", which houses most of my wire antennas and baluns, guy lines, guying stakes, hammer, extra paracord line, carabiners and tensioning clips, etc. With the contents of that box I can make just about any mast deployment work smoothly.

In total, I managed 13 contacts for the activation...all CW (6 hunted, 7 direct CQ calls). Propagation wasn't great, and the contacts mostly came from the West Coast with one stretch out to Missouri.