Visited 2011-03-27
Grid square CN97an10gx
My goal this trip is to get out of CN87. It so happens the border with CN97 is about two miles east. What can we find nearby?
I think I found the highest public roadway on the Sammamish Plateau at 1,022 feet (317m) among the new million-dollar homes above Highland Drive. It has a stunning panorama of Mt Baker to the north and Mt Rainier on the south. At least, it would when it’s not raining and dripping everywhere.
I made five contacts including some new hams, all with good reports in the region. I heard some stations in Portland but they were buried in the noise floor and they could not copy me. Net Control said the conditions were quite bad, so I was pleased to do hear Portland at all.
The eastward path was dead. Nobody could hear from Spokane at all. But I had some trees and a bit more hill behind me to the east, so I wasn’t expecting anything that direction.
More things for my checklist:
- Use the iPhone’s Compass app to find magnetic North.
- My lamppost tripod is unreliable on the slightest slope away from horizontal. Worse yet, it’s round and rolls easily given the slightest chance.
- Look into building a mast platform that goes under the front wheel.
- It’s nice to run coax through the door jamb instead of the window. Then I can close the window completely and stay warm and dry. Maybe. A drip loop is required or else the water follows the coax inside.
- There is a PNW VHF S spreadsheet online as a Google doc. It provides a useful summary of the usual suspects:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AohgbnNuj9MscDRQdkRhRGNSazFwX0thYnpzV29lRkE&gid=0 - I met G4AMD/7 on the air and we had a great chat about VHF propagation. There are a lot of interesting things that can happen to VHF / UHF signals, and there is a lot of fun stuff to learn.