Practicing CW at Red Rock Canyon State Park

This weekend allowed a quick day trip to Red Rock Canyon State Park (K-1189) in the Mojave Desert of California. I have activated this park in the past on SSB, but my goal this time was to activate via hunting other park activators on CW. I packed up the Mountain Topper, the Chelegance MC-750 Vertical, my SOTAbeams Bandhopper linked dipole and an untested End Fed Half Wave and headed to the desert.

I arrived a little later than planned but quickly set up the mast and the EFHW. As a commercially available antenna, I had hoped that it would be usable out of the box, but the SWR was unacceptably high and I’ll need to spend some time tuning it. I dropped the EFHW and switched to the Linked Dipole (20-30-40) and simultaneously set up the MC-750 vertical. After switching back and forth between the dipole and vertical, it was clear that the receive between the two antennas was almost identical in this situation. I stuck with the vertical for the rest of the day.

My hope was to get the needed contacts (10) to “activate” the park via hunting other active parks, but in the end I came up short by just 2 contacts by the time the bands dried up and the other activators had all gone home. If I were more confident in my ability to decode CW callsigns, I could have spotted myself on the POTA website and completed the activation that way, but I’ve still got a way to go before I would feel comfortable activating.

While operating, I learned that I need to spend some more time decoding and sending common phrases (73, 72, TU, UR, etc) in order to not get thrown off when additional phrases are given in the exchange. I was also getting hung up on sending similar characters (B vs D, H vs 5, etc) and often have to repeat myself to get the correct character sent.

Still making progress…