Actimation Report

No, that's not a typo...I actimated a park!
​ My daughter is now 6, but it wasn't that long ago that she was still trying out new words. The first time I heard her try to say "activate" I had just picked up my phone, and had accidentally held the home button down long enough to turn on Siri. My daughter promptly said "uh oh! You actimated Siri!" To this day, in our house we still use the word "actimate" quite regularly.

Anyway, enough about the nonsense that goes on in my house - I'm actually writing to update you on my second trip to Mashamoquet Brook State Park (You can read about the first trip here.)

This time around, I reserved the one camp site they have that has a power hook-up. Most of the camp-grounds I've gone to that had RV hookups had either 50 or 30 amp connections, plus a standard 15 or 20 amp outlet. I realized the first night of this trip however, that this site only has a 30 amp connection, so I ended up running off battery power for the first night anyway.

In spite of the power mishap, I had a good first night - my very first contact was actually with Jeff, KB3ZUK. Jeff is the North American Continental Representative, in addition to being the log manager for the call district I live in, for the WWFF program. It was fun to actually get a contact on the air with Jeff, after all these months of e-mails and such as I sent in my "actimation" logs!

After my contact with Jeff, I found a frequency of my own, and quickly racked up enough contacts to bring my total for this park past the 44 mark (the US awards only require 10 per park, but I like to shoot for 44 because that's where most of.the international awards kick in.)

Before evening number 2, I stopped at an RV center and picked up a couple adapters so that I could use the AC power at the campground:

in addition to this adapter, I also got one to go from 50 amp to 30 amp connections. This way I'm now covered for using AC power no matter what type of connection a place has. Of course, there is always the option to use batteries in places with no AC, but if it's available, why not make life easy?

With an easy power solution for the second evening, I was able to dive right in to making more contacts.  With the pressure off, I started out in CW.  This was a particularly exciting one for me, not because I made a lot of contacts, but because I upped my speed a little bit.  I leaned CW using the PC program Just Learn Morse Code, which uses the Koch/Farnsworth method.  As I practice I've been using faster character speeds, and faster word speeds, but on the air I've been hesitant, so prior to now I was keeping my keyer set at 5 wpm.  This time I decided to bump it up to 7 wpm, and I found it was actually easier for me to copy stations at this faster speed, because it's closer to what I've been practicing.  After  a few more like this I just might have to bump the speed up to 10 wpm and have a go!

Anyway, with plenty of SSB contacts, and a few more CW contacts under my belt, I was in good spirits as I packed up and headed out.  I don't know what park I'll end up at next, but I hope I have just as much fun as I did at Mashamoquet!

As a final note, if any of you are CW newbies like me (or seasoned pros for that matter) check out the ditdit.fm podcast - it's a new one, all about CW.  For me it has been a good resource for tips and hints from the CW pros.  It's also nice to hear the top notch operators talk about their experiences when they were in my shoes - great stuff!