POTA South Africa
Suikerkop Hiking Trail - ZA-0078
ZS6DX/ZS2M

I had fun activating POTA entity ZA-0078 (Suikerkop Hiking trail) on 23 March 2024. It was not an easy activation. Band conditions were down during the time I was activating, I could hear stations on 10 and 15m but they were way down, not even S1. Eventually I did manage to make a few DX contacts but 2 weeks earlier same time of the day I worked over 100 DX stations from my field station.

There were also weather issues, it rained twice, hard enough and with lightning in the area that I took the antenna down twice and had to find a place to hide. After the second time I went back to my vehicle, fortunately it was parked at the start of the trail, within the 30m specified in the rules so I just completed the activation from inside the car while it was raining outside.

I dropped the one back seat in the ML500 and used that as a "table" for the FT-891, worked well!

At one point I thought I would not be able to make the required minimum of 10 contacts to make it a valid activation. I wasted a lot of time by eventually having to put up the antenna 3 times. I also had very intermittent cell phone coverage so I could not really announce my activation or frequency but a few local guys went out of their way to make contacts with me, thanks everyone!

By the time I had enough and the sun was dropping I had 13 QSO's, far from great but enough, I will be going back to ZA-0078 soon, hopefully when band conditions and weather is better.

The Yaesu FT-891 worked perfectly, it will now become my field radio of choice unless I am planning a long hike. The one think I did find irritating is that when you have set the bandwidth narrower than the default on CW and you change bands it goes back to wide, even if you then go back to the original band, strange but not a major issue.

The 22Ah Lithium battery also worked well, I was on the air for about 3 hours, I ran 5W on CW but also tried 100W for a while to see if I could get spotted calling CQ. I used 50-100W for SSB as conditions were bad. The total capacity used, as reported by the Victron charger was 5Ah so it looks like I will get at least 8-10 hours of hard use out of the battery. When conditions are better and I only run 5W CW and maybe 10W SSB it will last a lot longer. What I still need to prove to myself is what the actual capacity of the battery is (as opposed to the advertised and often inflated capacity), to do this I need to run it right down to cut-off by the BMS and then recharge it.

The EFHW also worked well. I used the new Spiderbeam 12m fiberglass mast. It worked ok but it is far more flexible than I thought it would be. Even in a modest wind it bent so much that the antenna was no higher than it would have been on my far stiffer, and lighter, Comet 8m mast.

I need to decide on the mast, maybe if I use a dipole that is fixed at 2 ends it would be better but with the EFHW with only one side tied down it bends far more than what I would like even with modest tension on the antenna, the antenna was still sagging quite a bit so I could not put less tension on the antenna.

Look how far the mast bends with the EFHW, and the antenna is not even under much tension!

I am already planning the next activation, it will most likely be ZA-0075, Baviaans Kloof, as I was there during the SARL field day and it was a great location. Back then it was not a registered park but it is now. I will use the same setup but might go back to the Comet mast.

(c)R Venter 1996-2024
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