N6ADW

I’ve attempted several POTA activations, and this location is definitely my favorite. The park covers much of the bottom of the San Francisco Bay and there are many trails and bridges which cross the wetlands of the refuge. Conveniently there is a picnic shelter (labeled as a pavilion on the map) near the start of the Tidelands trail which was a great spot to set up a station and has a fantastic view.

I brought my Xiegu G90, fishing pole mast, and 33ft end-fed half-wave antenna. I tied the mast to the corner of the deck and put the wire antenna into an inverted-v configuration fed by 25ft of RG-316 coax into the shelter.

Within the first 10 minutes I made 3 park-2-park contacts which was the best start I’ve had with this radio so far. I’ve previously struggled to get any responses to my CQ calls when attempting Parks On The Air. The early strong signal reports and quick contacts was a sign that maybe today I would achieve a pileup. Unfortunately this did not happen, and after an hour of consistent self-spotting and calling CQ I switched back into hunter mode and the rest of my QSOs during the day were all park to park.

There were a lot of hikers and visitors that came by and many were interested in what the large fishing pole was for. Fortunately no one seemed to mind too much and no one from the park asked us to leave.

As we entered mid day the interference on the band was strong and the noise floor degraded, but it was a fun activation and I left with 11 QSOs in 3 hours time.