For a portion of day 1 of the ARRL September VHF Contest I operated at the summit of Sugarloaf Mountain in Boulder, Colorado.
Rewind a few days ago. I was browsing the web and I came across a posting about the VHF Contest. I had no idea the there was one going on. I don’t contest well, but I do use them as motivation for learning something new or honing existing skills.
This time I decided I would make a 6 meter antenna to try to work 6 meters. I had many internal conflicts about vertical vs. horizontal polarization. Near and far field polarization, my Superantenna which is vertically polarized, ground wave propagation down a conical mountain, etc.
So after hemming and hawing and listening to 1 person calling CQ on FT8 on 6 meters with my Signal Stick 2m/70cm HT antenna plugged into the VHF port of my ICOM 7100, I grabbed some wire, a calculator, and a BNC banana plug and made a dipole.
I wish they were female BNC since feedline/cables are generally male to male ends. I could plug it directly into my 705 when portable but that would be awkward.
I grabbed my Nano VNA, attached a typical 25 foot RG8 feed line (I thought about the losses in this cable and connectors at VHF vs. other). I trimmed (like really trimmed with a wire cutter) about 4 inches on each end to try and bring it to resonance on the lower portions of 6 meters.
You see, I previously had read VHF, Summits and More as well as K0NR’s excellent website that talks about VHF contesting. I wanted resonance on digital modes (since they are legal for this contest, as well as around the usual calling frequency. This meant I wanted basically 50 MHz to be resonant. So I cut and cut more and cut a little too much and then added a 4″ section back to each end of the dipole and got resonance around 50 MHz and then figured that I had to fold the legs down about 45 degrees to drop the center to achieve 1:1 SWR (at 6 or so feet off the ground in my backyard).
Then I connected my 705 and poked around on 6 meters. No one was around. I looked at FT8 and FT4. Nothing. The guy that was calling CQ earlier on FT8 wasn’t around. I threw out some CQ’s for a while but got nothing. I considered re-aiming the dipole to point to more populated areas but after looking at WSPRNet and not seeing much 6m activity in my area, I gave up and set my ICOM 7100 upstairs to just listen for 6m using my 2m 5/8 wave Signal Stick. If I heard something, then I’d try my dipole and 705 again.
Saturday
Here’s a video of Saturday
The contest was upon us. I decided to beat the heat and try 6 meters on an easy summit. We’ve hiked Sugar Loaf and Bald Mountain before. They’re relatively easy hikes after parking in a close-by parking lot. So I got greedy and looked up the altitudes of each peak.
Sugar Loaf = 8900 feet
Bald Mountain = 7140 feet
I’ve looked down at Bald Mountain from Sugar Loaf. While Bald Mountain is a shorter, easier hike, I chose Sugar Loaf. 1,760 more feet is more better!
So I gathered my QRP stuff:
- ICOM 705 (battery not charged fully)
- 3 element Arrow Antenna YAGI-UDA
- Homemade 6m wire dipole
- 23 foot tenkara fishing pole from AliExpress.
- 3D Printed pole PL-259/Dipole thingy courtesy of Thingiverse and Kevin Loughin (I planned on trying to hold up the dipole on my fishing pole.
- Baofeng Rx3 (synched bottom/to top display so you know the call sign of the repeater you’re using vs. just the frequency).
- SignalStick 2/70 antenna for the Baofeng
- Miady 6AH battery. Small and light to power the 705 to 10 watts, but in the end, left in the car.
- 20m homemade SOTA QRP EFHW with BNC female connector.
- 2 RG316 BNC cables. One with a SO239 end and one with a PL259 end – connected together to make a male-male bnc cable
- Portable Ed Fong J-pole (mainly because of its extra BNC patch cables)
All this stuff fit in my super-old REI Flash 18 back pack.
I also grabbed a mag mount 2 meter car antenna and threw it on top of the car since I wouldn’t have a cell signal in Boulder Canyon.
I left around 11 AM and took the highway to Boulder to save a few minutes vs taking my usual route past all the farms and visiting my farm animals. Then took some weird way past CU to get to Canyon Dr. A few miles up Canyon, I turned onto Sugarloaf road, past the turnoff for Betasso Preserve and the let my Subaru soak up the bumps on the dirt road that goes 1 mile up to the parking lot for the Switzerland Trail and Sugarloaf Mountain trailhead. I think that’s at 8100 feet or so.
There were dirt bikes making a ruckus and other hikers and their puppies going up and down from the summit.
I threw on my hiking boots since my right ankle loves to twist at the though of not walking on concrete or asphalt.
Then I headed up the mountain on the trail. The hike is pretty short although I heard it was 1.5 miles round trip or something. Meh.
I was more out of shape than I though, huffing and puffing up and thinking about the 5k I did in Vail and realizing running at 5,300 feet is very different than running at 8,300 feet, which is the base of Vail Village. I was glad that I was getting some exercise while going to play ham radio. This is what ICOM’s tagline is all about. “Get outside” or something.
The weather was a few degrees cooler up here, despite bluebird skies. It wasn’t overwhelmingly hot as it probably was in Boulder. I did eye several places to stop and operate that were not yet to the summit. But, I persisted – I wanted a 360 degree view and RF line-of-sight ability. So I pressed on and made it to the the summit.
There were a few small groups up there. A woman in a small tourist group nicely asked me if I wanted a photo of myself and I told her I lived down the hill from here. I later realized how smug must I must have sounded to be so lucky to live in this little slice of heaven.
I set-up on the opposite side of the summit away from a group of couples that were having a picnic. And by set-up I mean I put my stuff on the ground. Swinging my Yagi-Uda antenna around with horizontal polarization on 2m SSB on the calling frequency, I made a few quick contacts in my same grid square. There was nowhere to sit and I was getting good signals even with my Yagi-Uda on the ground on top the rocks!
I decided to move and eventually tried FM, failing to find a good horizontal place to put my antenna. I made a few FM contacts and then I got greedy and tried to try and count this as a SOTA activation. I changed my mind because I wanted to come back up here a different day to operate HF, with maybe different experimental antennas, including a super light Yagi-Uda.
By this time, everyone was off the summit so I went to the other side of the summit and did experiments with my EFHW, 6m dipole, while keeping an ear to 146.52 on my HT.
The noise floor was…through the floor. It was so quiet up there on 20 meters. My waterfall was full of people in QSO’s – CW, FT modes, RTTY, and SSB all across the band!
But then I realized I wasn’t there for HF so I turned my attention to my 6m VHF dipole which I strung up in the tree, horizontally. The SWR was 1:1 unlike at my QTH. Definitely different soil up here, I mean rocks. The top is like a giant scree field.
Then, I made a contact with someone not in my grid square! My first ever QSO on 6 meters!
Then I set up my EFHW on my 7.2 meter fishing pole that I got the previous day from China. Like a fool, I connected the end of the EFHW wire rather than the center of the wire where the highest current is on 20 meters. Nevertheless, I hit the Pacific North West – specifically an operator on the YL net. With 5 watts, using my super light QRP EFHW! There was a POTA operator nearby and in my skip so I wasn’t able to QSO with them with my antenna in a non-NVIS orientation.
Having little success when I went back to 6 meters, I decided I was hungry and to pack it up and head home, experiments finished.
As I was taking down the fishing pole, I apparently didn’t notice some weird mountain wasp getting angry with me. It stung me and it hurt! I knew what had happened and monitored myself for signs of allergy.
I continued to pack everything away and called my XYL while I was on the mountaintop and had a cell signal. I instructed her to turn on my radio and listen to the Colorado Connection repeater since I wouldn’t have cell signal in Boulder Canyon (but I did have a great signal to the ColCon repeaters with my magmount antenna on my car).
I made it back down to the car and had an uneventful ride home, grateful that if I did have an emergency that I could have gotten help via one of the repeater systems I frequent.
Sunday, the next day, I tried FT8 on 6 meters on my ICOM 7100 on more than QRP power and made a few contacts using my forsaken attic 9:1 EARCHI home-brew antenna and antenna tuner. A few more points for the contest! Otherwise 6 meters wasn’t open. Maybe it was the cloudy weather.
Overall it was a great learning experience – dragging up the gear to the summit, testing everything out in windy conditions, having success on VHF SSB on frequencies I don’t…frequent. And also testing out my ultralight EFHW that I made specifically for SOTA (since there are so many peaks around here).
The following day, I printed out QSL cards to all my voice contacts and mailed them. Hopefully I’ll get a few in return.
73,
de ae0rs
