https://ewpratten.com/blog/camping-radio/
Recently, my father and I took a trip out to a local provincial park for a weekend of camping.
Last time I had been camping happened to coincide with the period of time that I was starting to gain curiosity about amateur radio. I vividly recall being out there wishing I had a radio that I could use to communicate from the campsite.
So, to appease my past self, the present-tense radio-license-having version of me took my HF rig along to make some contacts.
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(Score: 1, Troll) by namefags_are_jerks on Monday July 29 2024, @12:00AM (4 children)
My personal best is sending a WSPR-mode 'txt message' from Australia to New York city on 2 milliwatts (..and an 'uncompromised' Inverted-V antenna ...that was ~20 metres across.. certainly big, but..)
Hopefully a few take notice of how international comms is /so easily doable/ today with contemporary radio tech. Even without the best antenna, and a low-powered small radio, someone who has learnt how to make things work can play with a capability that everyone thinks belongs to the Internet. The blogger has a high-end KX2 transceiver, but a $100 kit radio (like my uSDX) can do the same thing.
(Score: 1) by Aussie on Monday July 29 2024, @12:57AM
And here I am thinking 19000Km with 10w on FT8 through a crappy vertical was an achievement, well done!
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday July 29 2024, @04:44AM (2 children)
I get that this is kind of a geek thing, but apart from an emergency, I don't want a connection if I'm camping. How many people camping out of reach of cell signals are even going to want this?
(Score: 1) by HeadlineEditor on Monday July 29 2024, @11:44AM (1 child)
I'm with you! But for these guys it's the other way around. Campers don't bring radios. Radio guys go camping just for the challenge of operating in less than ideal conditions. See "Parks on the Air" : https://parksontheair.com/ [parksontheair.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday July 29 2024, @02:05PM
I figured, my main point was that I doubt this is a common enough thing for people to want to do that word getting out is going to get it banned or anything like that.
(Score: 2) by rufty on Monday July 29 2024, @05:12PM (2 children)
I've got a Yaesu FT817 I take car camping, run off the 12V socket and with a quarter wave vertical for 20m on a magmount. Works very nicely, for 20m only. For backpacking I've got a QDX, an endfed long wire and a polyvaricon tuner. Tried a base-loaded telescopic. But that's practically a dummy load.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 29 2024, @10:03PM (1 child)
A fun idea is a homemade roll up 6M dipole as 6M sporadic-E openings correspond nicely with the early months of the camping season (around here).
Something missed in the article is ease of deployment. I fool around with this stuff because I have a park pass and if I'm in the area while the wife/kids are busy with something else, if I have a half hour I can play radio for a half hour. If it took an hour to drag everything out and set it up, then I'd have negative thirty minutes to play radio. So I keep all the junk in a backpack. The "emcomm people" would call it a "go-bag" but its more useful for playing in the park.
There's a very tall public access timber tower on top of the tallest hill in the area at a nearby park (would advise not being nearby in a thunderstorm LOL). Its hilarious to climb the tower with a HT and talk on repeaters 40, 60, even 75 miles away with people who don't believe I am where I claim to be. The wind noise usually convinces them that I am indeed on top of a tower LOL. Its a pity repeaters are so dead compared to the old days of the 80s.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 30 2024, @10:37PM
> a very tall public access timber tower
There's a fire tower (visual observation during forest fire season) in State Forest, near a spot that I've camped at many times. Never tried to climb the stairs, but like your tower, I believe they are not locked up, so climbing is possible.
Maybe the next time you go up, you can take some wire (coax?) and hang it down from an antenna up top. Would scrap cable-TV coax work? It's all over for the taking, if anyone has a problem they just put in a new cable to the house. That way, the next time you can just plug in at the bottom and won't have to climb the stairs? Disguise the wire a little bit and it may be years before anyone notices!