Tough lessons

Post contains affiliate link

As promised, I'm finally giving my update on my NPOTA activation at Cuyahoga Valley National Park.  This was a challenging activation for me, but I managed to get enough contacts to make it "count" and I learned something about my kit of portable stuff.

     This activation happened when I was on one of my trips for work.  I was starting out at our Cleveland, Ohio office, and then finishing up the trip in our Pittsburg PA office.  Since Cleveland is about a 5 hour drive my home, I drove out there, and then stopped to do this activation on the drive between the two offices.  I stopped for a quick photo op as I entered the park....little did I know what the afternoon was going to bring...

     The area in the park where I decided to set up was at the Wetmore Trailhead.  I picked that location, because based on the maps I could find on the park's web site it seemed like a decent place where I could park my car, set up my Buddiepole beside it, and operate similar to the way I did at Minuteman National Park.  I also thought it was a good spot because based on elevation maps I looked at, it also seemed like this parking area sat at a relatively high area, and it had bathrooms (well, a seat over a hole in the ground, in one of the new style of "composting" toilets that are in a lot of the parks now.)  

     I set up my equipment in my traditional method, except instead of a standard flat dipole I set up my Buddiepole as an inverted V.  No reason in particular - just figured i'd do it that way to see how it played.  

     When I set it up it didn't tune with the same taps on the coils that it normally does, so I assumed that this had to do with the different impedance at the feedpoint because of inverted V format.  I made the adjustments to get decent match (using my RigExpert AA-54 analyzer), I started transmitting and.......nothing.  I called for a looooong time and got no responses.  
     I reached the point where I was going to give up, but figured I'd try a different band first.  When I started to re-tune for the other band I got some weird fluctuations on my analyzer, so I started fiddling with connections, and actually changed out my coax and presto - things started tuning up like normal.  Conditions still weren't great, but at least I started making some contacts!
     All of this led me to what many of you probably already knew.  Cheap coax goes bad fast.  I had grabbed some coax when the Radio Shack stores were going out of business, and this is what I had been using with this antenna.  I now have some decent RG-8X on it's way from DX Engineering, to replace the Radio Shack stuff in my portable kit.  Lesson learned.

What ham radio lessons have you learned the hard way?  Leave a comment and let me know!