The plan was put together with much haste, as I wanted to get up in the mountains before any bad storms hit. I used the tools at SOTAWatch to find some candidate peaks that were within reasonable driving distance and not very high, then digitally scouted them using Google Earth. The initial research yielded a list of about 5 candidate peaks which fit my criteria. After more studying, I decided to try for Clatskanie Moutain W7/NC-039. It's roughly 60 miles from my house, which translates to a one-way drive time of about 1.5 hours. The logging road from the highway to the peak was only about 3 miles, and it looked like I could drive all the way to the peak if I wanted to. The plan that I had in mind was to park at the cutoff to the little spur road that branched off to the peak. The distance from this intersection to the peak is only about 500 meters, an easy hike, but one that would fit within the spirit of the SOTA rules.

After deciding on a peak, I managed to rope Dave W8NF into going on the trip with me, a decision that I would be very grateful for later. Since I recently sold my FT-817, the only portable radio that I currently have is my CC-20 beta unit, and it was in a bit of a torn-up state since I've been making corrections that will be implemented in the final version. I also wanted to do some 10 meter operation, so I thought it would be fun to slap together a VXO-tuned DSB rig that might allow me to snag a few voice QSOs. Without getting into the painful details, I worked furiously to build the DSB rig and get the CC-20 back into working condition (without a proper enclosure!). In a homage to my school days, I didn't finish until late night just before the day we were to go on our little expedition, and even then I wasn't sure that my 10 meter DSB rig was working correctly.

So the designated day, Saturday, 3 December came around and I was running on about four hours of sleep, but still excited to get up around 8 AM to get going. By 9:30 AM, I was out the door, able to grab my coffee, and get to Dave's house. We quickly made way to the peak, and had little difficulty finding the logging road off of the highway that would take us up to the peak. There was only one small problem. The gate was locked. I should have done better due diligence (such as experienced SOTA expeditioner KK7DS explains here) and picked up a proper topo map from the local forestry office. I was planning on a short hike to the peak, but I really didn't want to turn around and drive back 1.5 hours having not even tried. I knew we were about 3 miles from the peak, which was a bit of a hike for some one as out of conditioning as me, but I felt I could probably hack it. Graciously, Dave agreed to hike it, so we grabbed our packs and I lugged the bulky, oversized sack with the Buddipole and we made way for Clatskanie Mountain. Fortunately for us, the weather couldn't be any better for a December trek in the Oregon Coastal Range. The skies were mostly clear, with just a bit of high clouds and some patches of fog below us.

We had a pleasant hike up to the peak, and while I (the guy who is mostly sedentary and fat) had to stop for frequent breathers, Dave (the guy who runs half-marathons) didn't seem to have too much difficulty with the 3 mile hike and 700 foot elevation gain. When we reached the peak at sometime around 1:30 PM, we were greeted with a very spiffy microwave tower and wonderful view of the Columbia River below us to the north. The temperature was chilly (I'm guessing around 35° F) but the wind was slight.

There was a large earthen berm behind the microwave facility that gave us a point to operate with the mountain sloping away west, north, and east. I brought along my EFHW antennas, but decided not to deploy them at first since there weren't any trees at this location. I deployed the Buddipole in L-configuration with Dave's help and he broke out his FT-817 and started listening on 10 meters. As expected, the bands were ultra quiet up here far away from any big RF noise generators (save that big microwave tower right behind us!).

While Dave sent out some CQs on 28.060 MHz, I unpacked my DSB radio and the CC-20 beta. Dave didn't have any luck getting responses, which struck me as a bit odd. We could hear plenty of signals, and we had his Elecraft T-1 in-line and tuned-up. So I decided to try the DSB radio. A few quick cable changes and it was ready to go. Only one small problem. It was completely deaf. Well, that's what I get for trying to get a radio on the air in such a hasty fashion. I felt bad because I knew that there were people listening for me on my pre-spotted frequency of 28.650 MHz, but somewhat surprisingly I was wasn't successful in getting cell service on the peak, so I couldn't spot a new notification. Sometime around these events, the wind started picking up, making the temperature feel wicked cold with the wind chill factor.

So next up was the CC-20. Again, dead as a doornail (I later found out that it was a bad solder joint in the VFO circuitry that popped loose on the hike). Dave was kind enough to let me use his FT-817 to try to get my four required QSOs to count for a proper SOTA activation. The 10 meter QRP watering hole was awfully quiet, but I figured that some CQing should bring people out. Turns out that I didn't have much luck. I managed to work a weak WA8REI, then a booming JA1KGW (this guy is an awesome QRPer). By this time, both Dave and I were getting awfully cold. The wind seemed to be getting stronger and the temperature felt like it kept dropping. My further CQs were going unanswered, so I thought that 10 meters might be starting to close up and that we should move to 20.

We quickly re-resonated the Buddipole for 20 meters and re-tuned the T-1. I tried calling CQ on a few different frequencies near the QRP watering hole, but never did get any calls on 20 meters. I'm not sure how long I tried calling, but I didn't have a memory keyer to use, so I was manually sending the CQ each time, and it was getting sloppier and sloppier due to my numb hands. Poor Dave was pacing around to keep warm by this point. As much as it killed me to leave before activating the summit, we we both very uncomfortable and needed to leave soon regardless, because we only had about 1.5 hours of sunlight left at this point.

All of our stuff got packed up in record time and we started downhill at a brisk pace. But only a few hundred meters from the peak, my leg started cramping up bad from the cold weather. A bit of stretching worked it out, but then it kept recurring every few hundred meters! We both wanted to get back to the warmth of my pickup as fast as possible, but my leg was not cooperating very well. Dave patiently waited as I stopped each time to try to work out the leg cramps. Although it took longer than expected, we did reach the gate right when the dark was really starting to set in. Getting back in the truck and heating up my body mercifully ended the awful leg cramps.

I'm a perfectionist by nature, so it still bothers me that I didn't get my activation of Clataskanie Mountain. And it's tough to try to demonstrate the fun and effectiveness of QRP to a non-QRPer like  Dave when you have such a lousy radio day as I did. I am very glad that Dave was there, as I might have stayed on the peak too late to get back before dark if I was only thinking of myself and of trying to complete my activation. I also realized that a nearly 7 mile round trip hike for a unconditioned hiker such as myself would have been incredibly foolish. If my leg cramps had been worse, I could have been stuck up there in the dark over night. I used to hike like this with no problems, but I have to remind myself that this was 10+ years ago and that I was in much better shape then.

It's a cliché, but I did learn a lot from the trip, regardless of the radio results. I do intend to try it again in the spring, once the bad winter storms have passed and I have my radios really ready to go. Stay tuned for further adventures!

With the bands being as hot as they have been in the last month or so, it hasn't been a great challenge to fill up the band slot chart for the most part. Almost all of the QSOs made over the last few days have been snagged within one or two calls (I also thank W9KNI's book The Complete DXer for teaching me very valuable basic DXing skills). I will admit that I've been running 100 W output for these QSOs — with one important exception.

20 meters CW was one of the slots that I had not yet filled as of this morning (oddly enough, since that's THE DX band). Over the last few weekends, I've been hacking away on the firmware to the CC-Series, trying to get the last major features up and working bug-free. Thanks to a request from AA7EE, I just implemented XIT on top of the RIT that was already in the firmware (speaking of Dave, go check out his even more impressive T32C QRP story). The nice thing about XIT is that it allows you to relatively easily work split stations like DX, even though there is no "official" dual-VFO capability in the rig. Since the XIT capability seemed to be mostly working correctly, I wanted to put the CC-20 on the air to try it out and be certain. The first station that I worked today with the CC-20 was K6JSS/KL7, operated by well-known Alaskan QRPer AL7FS. It was a simplex QSO, but it was nice to bust the mini-pileup with my first call. While continuing to work on CC-20 development, I monitored the DX cluster to see when T32C would show up on 20 meters. Sure enough, I ended up seeing him pop up on the cluster at about 0200 UTC. Time to put the CC-20 to the test.

I don't have a valiant battle to describe. It took me about 10 calls to finally get him, although there weren't a lot of people calling him. I suspect that the majority of my trouble in getting him was in zero-beating him with the unpackaged encoder knob. While in RIT or XIT mode, pressing in the tune knob toggles between the TX and RX VFOs. Trying to do that quickly when it's not mounted on a chassis is tricky! Regardless, it didn't take long until I heard the sweet sound of my callsign coming back to me across the vast Pacific Ocean. Two watts spanning 3600 miles to a tropical island in the middle of a huge ocean is pretty neat. This doesn't rank in the annals of great QRP achievements, but it will always be a memorable QSO for me.

The web site is nice, but being a Linux nerd, I wanted to see if I could find comparable software for my PC. A small bit of searching led me to VOACAPL from HZ1JW, and the matching package pythonProp, which gives a GUI frontend to the CLI VOACAP interface.

The installation of the VOACAPL software is quite easy if you are using Ubuntu. Just download the .DEB file and install using your favorite package manager. Installing pythonProp is a bit more involved, since there are a fair number of dependencies to install first, but as long as you closely follow the instructions on the website it shouldn't be much of a problem.

If you are like me and the thought of tackling VOACAP through the command line was a little bit daunting, then the voacapgui tool (in the pythonProp package) is just what you are looking for. The GUI has three main tabs for interacting with the program: one for the site information (transmitter and receiver QTH, antenna, and power), one tab to execute point-to-point channel analysis, and one for generating area propagation maps.

As you can see above, the P2P tab can get you a nice plot of the probability of making a QSO over a certain path with the specified antennae and power levels. And since this is a Linux port of the program that Dave used on the web, the data we got back was nearly identical. No 20 meter QSOs for us right now.

Here you can see an area map showing circuit reliability for 7 MHz at 0300 UTC during Oct 2011 using 5 watts. That doesn't look very good! (Sometimes I wonder if the predictions for low power are a bit out-of-whack. This software was originally written for VOA, so I wonder if it's really calculating the reliability for a 5 W AM signal. I am a total novice at this, so I expect some VOACAP expert will probably put me some knowledge on this, as the kids say).

Any way, it's a neat package to play around with if you have a Linux box. Many thanks to HZ1JW for taking the time to port VOACAP over to Linux in a easy-to-use package.

Update

Sure enough, I made a mistake. Had I read the documentation more thoroughly, I would have seen that parameter Required SNR was set to a default suitable for SSB. At least I was onto the right idea a few paragraphs above. Here's the same area plot as before, but with the Required SNR set for a suggested value of 24 for CW operation.

That looks better!

ARCI will be offering some special awards in connection with the event. Rather than try to rehash them, allow me to requote the messages sent to QRP-L. First, details on certificates and QSLs from W4DU:

We recently announced that the club will mark its' 50th anniversary by
activating the club call (K6JSS) in all 50 states throughout 2011 (see
http://www.qrparci.org/content/view/8371/118/ ). A special "Worked All
States" certificate will be issued to all that qualify.  QSL cards will be
sent via SASE.  We are off to a good start as Connecticut and Hawaii were on
during the first two weeks of the year.  Currently, Georgia operators are
activating K6JSS.  Our thanks to the operators in these three states in
getting us off to a great start!  A schedule for this event along with other
helpful details is available at the link above. Here are a few items that
warrant clarification:

1.  A valid contact is considered an exchange of signal reports - QRP ARCI
numbers are not required nor are QTH/Name/etc. But we suggest RST + QRP ARCI
number or power out if not a member.

2. You can "claim" the K6JSS QRP ARCI number even if it is not exchanged.
We all will know pretty quickly, if not previously, that it is QRP ARCI #1.
If you don't know your QRP ARCI number, go to http://qrparci.org/ and click
on "Member Lookup".  Enter you call and your number will be displayed. If
you are not a member, you can exchange power out in lieu of a number.  Of
course you can also join at http://www.qrparci.org and receive a number!

3. Requests for QSLs go to the address listed at qrz.com for K6JSS. Please
send an SASE.  All requests for QSLs with an SASE will be honored.  However,
to control the costs and the work of our volunteers, we ask that you not
request a K6JSS QSL for each and every state you work during the year. Of
course if you require a QSL for an award, then we'll be happy to QSL with an
SASE of course.  Again, all requests for QSLs will be honored.  Just use
your discretion as to help us control the load.  The QSL card design is
complete; we are just tweaking it. We will not have cards to mail to you
until approximately February 1.  We will NOT be doing LoTW which we have
considered because it is very complicated for this event

4. At the end of the year, special certificates (different from the QRP All
States award) will be issued to any amateur confirming QSOs with K6JSS in 20
or more of the 50 states of the USA while running QRP. Endorsement
certificates are issued at 30, 40 and 50 states confirmed. QRP ARCI awards
do not require QSLs with the application for an award.  Just a list that you
prepare certifying that you worked the stations listed for the award and GCR
- General Class Review of 2 General Class or higher amateur friends of
yours.  You can down load the GCR form on the qrparci.org site.  This
approach will be used for the Golden Jubilee Award.

5. If you miss a few states and are desirous of getting all fifty, we will
present some opportunities at the year's end to pick up a few states that
you may have missed.  So if you find yourself getting a late start, jump in
and work what is on now.

We are encouraging K6JSS operators to work as many modes and bands as
possible.  Check QRP Spots (http://qrpspots.com/ ) often to determine who is
on.

Since I am in Georgia, I am one of the ops activating the call this week.
Two nights on 60 meters have yielded 24 contacts in 2 countries and 15
states.   Ill be trying RTTY and 17 meter SSB later in the week.

Enjoy the year!

Ken Evans, W4DU
President - QRP ARCI

Next, a bit on extra prizes from ARRL courtesy of W1RFI:

<snip>

I also sweetened the pot with some 2012 ARRL Handbooks to be given out
as prizes.  They will be defaced with signatures from the ARRL Lab
staff, so they will have no monetary worth, but are much like plaques
and other prizes for various on-the-air contests.

The first Handbook will go to the first person to work all 50 states, so
out of the ones that have 49 states near the end, one will be first.

Nine others will be given to the persons who work all 50 states with the
least amount of total time spent on the air, starting at 0001 Z after
each state is active. Honor system on logs and just total the time.  If
there are not enough 50-state people, we will start counting back to 49,
48. etc., with the least amount of time for each having priority.

One other Handbook will be saved for whoever works K6JSS on the largest
comibnation of bands and modes, so go get 'em on different modes.

If you miss a state, don't worry, as there will be a few ways announced
later on how you can make up the state later. It will be quite hard to
work all 50 states, especially KL7, where propagation can make QSOs
pretty tough. The ICEPAC software does a better job than VOACAP to
predict propagation at high latitudes, so when the KL7 operation is
firmed up, I will post a link to a prop chart for KL7 to the mainland
that may help the KL7 and mainland ops plan their operating.

So everybody will have a shot at a prize here if they manage a good
showing and there are certificates going to be issued for working 20 or
more states.  And although the makeup plans aren't finalized yet (sorry,
we ARCI BoD folks are all volunteers), it should easy to manage to get
credited for all 50 states.

There is a real shot that a few may manage to work all 50 states with
K6JSS and I think that would be a hoot to see a WAS award issues for
contact with one call sign!

Ed Hare, W1RFI
ARRL - The national association for Amateur Radio
ARRL Laboratory Manager

<snip>

For some stupid reason, I didn't really think about this event until the first week had passed, which was the state of Connecticut. However, I've made a 2-way QRP QSO with every state after CT, and hope to get as many more as I can this year. It would be great to get QRP WAS (I don't even have regular old WAS confirmed); which seems like a daunting task, but I really only have to successfully make one QSO a week. I'm pretty sure that I can hit most states from here with my current antenna system. One good thing going for me is the ease of contacting the states that are difficult for many other hams out east: Alaska and Hawaii. I've already bagged HI, and AK contacts are rarely a problem for me (unless the solar winds wipe out the path).

I'd like to operate K6JSS/7 for the State of Oregon, but I'm a bit leery of committing myself to that right now, given how hard it is for me to get more than a few minutes of operating time while my son naps. Hopefully, things will settle down enough to let me do a little bit of operating when the time comes.

Even if you are not a QRP op, I hope you will try to make some QSOs with the special event stations. Even if you don't work CW, there are ops that are using SSB...so you have no excuse. Check QRPSPOTS for information on where to find the current K6JSS operations.

KE7GKM QSO

Over the last few days, Jennifer has been off work, so I've been able to spend more time in the shack working on Project X. I only recently made my first QSO with the prototype rig (I think propagation was unfavorable for me when I was trying late in the evenings), so I've been leaving the radio hooked up to my bench AF amp and monitoring 7030 kHz during the day.

Late this afternoon, I heard a very strong station calling CQ just a bit up from 7030. I bumped the VFO up a bit and found that it was KE7GKM calling at a nice, comfortable speed for me (my CW is rusty after quite a few months off the air). While I called him back, the thought occurred to me that the call sounded familiar, but I couldn't remember how. After getting the QSO basics out of the way, I remembered why. Bob said that he was using a VRX-1 and homebrew QRP transmitter combo! Then it hit me that Bob had just e-mailed me about a week ago to ask me a few questions regarding the VRX-1.

I don't get on the air as much as I should (seems like I'm melting solder way more than pounding brass), but when I get a chance, it means so much to me to have a contact with someone who has built one of my radio designs. It's even more special when I get that make that QSO with a homebrewed radio on my own end as well. If I remember correctly, this is only the second time that I've done such a thing.

Bob told me that he is trying to get to 100 QSOs with his VRX-1/HB TX combo, and that I was QSO #80 (if I remember correctly, my notes aren't great). I wish Bob all the best of luck in his endeavor. It certainly looks like he doesn't have much more to do in order to meet his goal.

It's hard to beat an experience like this in capturing the essence of amateur radio for me. It is my hope that more amateurs will homebrew their own gear so that they can get that same thrill.

The article which I found describes a condition known as Pareidolia, as Wikipedia sums up quite succinctly:

Pareidolia (pronounced /pærɪˈdoʊliə/ pa-ri-DOE-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.

Long story short, our brains are supremely attuned to pattern matching, probably as a survival mechanism. At times, it is likely that it leads us to perceive meaningful patterns where in reality there are none. An extreme example would be those people who see images of Jesus in their grilled cheese sandwich or that nutty Reverse Speech guy, but we've all experienced minor versions of it at some times in our lives.

It seems that there must be some aspect of immersing yourself in CW that makes you even more susceptible to the phenomena for some time afterward. In my experience, sometimes it's taken an hour or two to shake it from my head. Even when I haven't been recently working CW, there are times where some random squeaks or beeps perk up my ears and get me in the CW copying mind frame. It's a funny and peculiar thing, to be sure.

Anyway, my inbox has been blowing up with DX Sherlock alerts telling me that 6 meters has been open most evenings over the last few weeks. I finally broke down and dug out the Buddipole components on Friday so I could try to snag a few QSOs on 50 MHz. I managed to grab a few SSB QRP QSOs with the FT-817 into VE4 and VE6-land on Friday night using the Buddipole in a simple dipole configuration. The band was in great shape that night, as I could hear a lot of East Coast stations coming in quite strong via multihop Es. On Saturday, I tried to work CW QRP on 50.096 MHz but had zero success even after calling CQ many, many times. The band was open and there was still plenty of activity on the SSB portion of the band, but CW was a bust. Come on CW ops, we've got to do better than this.

I still managed to make it a interesting ham radio night. After packing in the gear from the back deck, I went into the shack, flipped on the HF rig, and checked 20 meters (just around sunset local time). Very soon I stumbled upon the legendary Martti, OH2BH calling US West Coast stations. After a quick tune-up, I was able to snag him within about 4 calls. He was absolutely booming into Beaverton (by the sounds of it, he was booming into the entire western portion of the US). This was my first QSO with Martti and was memorable to be sure.

Moving on to a more unpleasant topic, am I the only one who things that most of the ham mailing lists are dying of a creeping mediocrity and groupthink mentality? The big two QRP-Ls are mostly a joke as far as getting an interesting, topical discussion going. On the other hand, start bitching about computers or some other off-topic old fart rant, and you'll get 30 messages a day. The SKCC group made me sick with its virtual pitchforks-and-torches assault on the new owner of Vibroplex because he had the audacity to replace the stamped brass identification plates with a silkscreened version. The way that a few prominent members of that group (including one who is affiliated with a competing key manufacturer I might add) character assassinated the owner was quite disgusting.

This provides a nice segue into another topic people love to hate: Twitter. I quit tweeting a few months ago due to the large jackass/decent person ratio that I was experiencing. I thought I would miss it quite a bit, but once I got over the DTs in a few days I didn't really miss it much at all. I still debate whether I should go active on Twitter again, because I see some utility in it; but even when you remove the jerk factor, it still feels like drinking from a firehose most of the time. Not to mention that huge time sink that results from checking your account all of the time make sure you are up-to-the-minute on the latest crap. What to do?

Finally, a plea. Some of you may know of qrpedia.com, which I tried (and failed miserably) to turn into a QRP/homebrewer aggregated blog and knowledge repository. It's already in sad shape, but with the new kid coming, I know I'll have no time to devote to it, so I need to let it go. I don't want to nuke the site because there are a handful of people who put a lot of hard work into posting content there. I would like to sell the site for a nominal price and have it go to someone who could give it another chance. Please contact me if this interests you at all. Prices and terms are very negotiable.

Now I have to get ready to fly out of here next week for Dayton. I don't know if I'll be able to liveblog from Dayton, but I'll do my best to get some photos and initial impressions up on the blog while I'm still there. I hope to get at least one post up each day I'm there. I can't wait to meet all you QRPers at FDIM!

Dear amigos :
The 40 meters band changed last year ... when the worldwide assignment for ITU Regions I, II and III was finally made totally compatible for the first 200 kiloHertz. According to what we have learned here, this was a difficult to work out agreement, but at the end
thanks to the presence of radio amateurs sitting as members of many of
the nation's delegations attending the ITU WARC... it became a reality...
So, now we have the 7100 to 7200 segment for radio amateurs exclusive use. My understanding is that the US FCC decided to expand the 40 meter phone band down to 7125 kiloHertz...
That leaves the segment from 7100 to 7125 kiloHertz quite useable for CW...
My suggestion is to start using 7105 or 7110 kiloHertz as the QRP
meeting frequency, replacing 7030 and 7040 kiloHertz that are under so much QRM, especially from digital modes. I agree that many stations have already equipment with crystals for either 7030 or
7040 kHz... but for those of us with VFO capability, enjoying the much
more clear channels between 7105 and 7110 kHz opens up the possibility of many more QRM free QSO's...
My observations carried on during the past several days confirm that
that segment of 40 meters right next to 7100 is clear much of the time  !
Let's give it a try !!!

73 and DX
Arnie Coro
CO2KK

The positive response to Arnie's call to action was immensely gratifying to me. In addition to all of the reflector replies, there have also been some ham bloggers taking up the topic. I've long been a fan of this little slice of bandwidth, but at times it has been hard to scare up contacts there. In the last couple of years, SKCC has probably been making the most extensive use of the sub-band, which has increased the traffic there a fair amount and has brought more attention to the frequencies as a place to have a nice, relaxed CW QSO.

Not to long ago, I dreamed about ways to help increase the use of these frequencies, and even started chatting with a few other hams about ways to spark some interest. However, like a whole lot of my ideas, they never get off the launchpad since I just don't have the time to invest in all of them. After having a few unpleasant encounters with RTTY contesters running me off 40 meter frequencies last weekend, I'm even more determined to help promote 7100-7125 as a QRP (and general CW) safe spot.

I've become inspired enough that I've decided to take a new design for a minimalistic superhet rig that I'm working on and adapt it to operate on these frequencies. If there's any interest in it, I might even take a crack at offering it as a kit for purchase. Long live 40 meter QRP!

After about an hour of trying, I finally managed to snag a QSO with Bert using 5 watts! A great day for QRP!

Take a listen to this QSO which was recorded a bit before I made my contact with F6HKA. You can definitely hear the watery, fluttery sound of his signal.