N1CLC: 2019-09-28 Black Mountain, Rain, and Mud

Today’s expedition takes me to Black Mountain, located near Ramona, California. I’ve recently acquired an Elecraft KX2, a 10 watt very small high quality HF ham radio and I’m itching to test it out. I picked it up used from a ham in northern California which saved me a bundle. I really want to lighten my load and by my calculations, switching to the KX2 will save me 7 lbs of weight!!!

Another incentive is the “ARIZONA S2S 10-POINT MADNESS” that is hapening this weekend. That “madness” means that a lot of hams will be on summits in Arizona, giving me plenty of opportunity to get some more summit to summit points, something I enjoy doing. I was going to join Adam on a summit today but I had already done the planned peak. By choosing this drive up location, I get some points and figured I would haul some extra equipment and try some high power VHF. My 3-element yagi 2m isn’t going to be nearly as good as Adams custom 6 element but I thought it would be fun to try since today’s mission didn’t require me to backpack it in.

In preparation for today’s hike, I took a tip from K6ARK and epoxied some loops onto my telescoping mast so that it’s easier to secure. I think it came out pretty well.

The forecast was for cloudy skies and I sorta slept in a bit till 8AM given the cloudy skies, cool temps and a bit of drizzle. I was expecting the conditions to improve as the day went on. As I drove into Escondido the drizzle turned into a good rain... Hmmm, this could be a problem. The road up to this peak is very narrow and in pretty bad shape. Because the ground was wet, my AWD kicked in and helped me keep from getting stuck and keep moving up some steep parts. Unfortunately, on the way up I misjudged a rock or high section created by a rut and crunched my muffler. <insert sad face here>.

Once I got on top I was in the clouds with a light drizzle to rain. I setup my pushup pole and LNR light weight antenna, then waited for the rain to stop. Once it stopped, I jumped out and got on the air with the KX2. The bands were pretty busy and operators in AZ had been on their summits for a while and they had a lot of traffic. My first contact was a special event station in Lewisville, TX. I heard the operator calling CQ when I turned the radio on. My second contact was another operator on a mountain top in Arizona, K7TSY, on Summit Mountain, north east of Prescott Valley. I put my spot out on sotawatch.org and quickly picked up Gary (W0MNA) and Martha (W0ERI) from Oklahoma. I did get a couple of other summit-to-summits to the Arizona crew, one of them via CW. I tried others on CW but just couldn’t break in, they had quite a pileup waiting.

In my last post, I mentioned that Adam, K6ARK, built a 2m yagi to see if he could make Arizona contacts with it during today’s “ARIZONA S2S 10-POINT MADNESS”. Normally, VHF radio is pretty short rang. 150 miles is doable but it’s normally used for local city comms. Adam killed it with multiple contacts over 300 miles. Pretty cool.

I bumbled around a bit with the new radio since I don’t have all of the buttonology memorized yet, but it worked beautifully. I’m looking forward to reducing the weight in my pack by switching over to the KX2. That weight comes from being able to leave behind the FT-891 100W radio, battery and tuner (9 lbs), and take the KX2 with it's built-in battery and tuner at only 2 lbs. Sure I'm giving up max range but if I can get my CW copy speed up, I’ll be able to get some longer range contacts using CW. I’m looking forward to my first EU, New Zealand or other long rang CW contact. I’ve reached Japan on 5 watts with SSB/voice using my Yaesu 817, so that’s always doable given the right conditions.

I figured it was time to wrap things up when the rain started to move back in, so I quickly packed up and headed down the hill. One more surprise was still in store for me, slick-as-snot roads. The soil here turns the roads into a slimy slippery mess so it was an exciting drive down. It was a tad unnerving to be going around a corner sideways. Definitely took it slow, I didn’t want to slide it off a cliff.

Overall, mission accomplished. I tested the new radio with a different antenna, got some summit-to-summit-contacts, and checked another peak off the list.

The only reason this wasn’t an A+ trip was due to the hole I put in the muffler... Next up, muffler repair.

Contacts

Date:28/Sep/2019 Summit:W6/CT-157 (Black Mountain) Call Used:N1CLC Points: 4 Bonus: 0 Delete

Time	Call	Band	Mode	Notes
17:03z	W5LVC	7MHz	SSB
17:27z	K7TSY	7MHz	SSB
17:28z	W0MNA	14MHz	SSB
17:38z	W0ERI	14MHz	SSB
17:38z	KF7NP	14MHz	SSB
17:40z	N7CW	7MHz	CW
17:58z	AE9Q	7MHz	SSB
18:06z	N6DNM	7MHz	SSB
18:12z	AB6SO	7MHz	SSB
18:13z	K6QCB	7MHz	SSB
18:14z	KL7HM	7MHz	SSB
18:14z	W6JP	7MHz	SSB