A quick visit to Buckhorn SWA, US-12077

I was up early today, with a choice: hike, or play radio? Radio won today, and I headed for Buckhorn SWA. We had thunderstorms last night and it was still windy and overcast. I imagine that the trails would be muddy and slippery.

I remembered to bring along a long tape measure, so while setting up I took time to measure the new whip antenna. As advertised, it is 18′ 2 1/2″ when fully extended, so I pushed the top section mostly back in to make 17 feet exactly. This gave me the pretty-flat, less than 2:1 SWR that the old (broken) one had.

While tuning around for a nice empty spot I heard KC5UZI calling CQ POTA nice and clear, so I paused for a park-to-park; a few KHz along, I heard a JJ station start calling CQ DX but he could not hear me, so when his pileup started forming I kept moving up until I found some empty air waves. After a few “is this frequency in use?” calls I started CQing and self-spotted.

US-12077 is a pretty new entity, so I have decided that it’s a good spot to play “rare DX” for a while, and a couple of stations did in fact thank me for a new one in their logs, kind of a good feeling. Almost everyone wished me a “good day out in the park”, and I always reply “it’s always good to be out in a park!”

Maybe it was the early hour? It took around 50 minutes to log 15 contacts.

When I was all packed up, I considered activating Yellow River SWA, only a few miles away, I even drove there; but the looming sense of There’s Probably Something Important That Needs Doing At Home sent me packing.

Thanks for visiting driftlessqrp!