March 11, 2023. Saturday morning I drove down to Macon, GA for a training exercise/Field Day with the Macon congregation of my church. I am the EmComm coordinator for about 15 of these congregations located throughout the northern half of GA. I was invited to provide technical assistance and give an overview of the EmComm structure for the state, regional, and national levels. We met at the Flat Creek State Fishing Lake (K-7465) near Perry GA. We had an open field reserved for us and it turned out to be a beautiful day.
I did set up a station.
It had been a while since I used the IC-7300 in the field because I was evaluating the FTDX10 as a field radio. These little mini-exercises are a great way to check your gear and make it works the way you intended it to. This was a prudent exercise as switching my computers back to the Icom were a little more trying than I had originally thought. The Yaesu’s take a little more fiddling than the Icom’s and I had to unfiddle my laptop to get things going again. Once I got that sorted, I had an issue with a new tuner. I recently bought an LDG remote tuner to use with my random wire vertical antenna. It worked great with the Yaesu but I could not get it to work with the Icom. Luckily I had my old Z-100 Pro so I swapped them out and continued on. The issue was a short between the ear cups. When I ran the remote tuner with the Yaesu I hooked it up to a battery for power. With the Icom, I tried to use the antenna tuner port on the radio and it didn’t work. It wasn’t until I got home that I figured it out. To use the remote tuner, it has to be hooked up to a battery/power-supply. Testing at home confirmed my hypothesis. My guess is that the tuner draws more power than the Icom can handle.
My main purpose there was to help people sort out their radios and give an overview of our EmComm program. This is to say that I did a lot more talking and a lot less operating. However, I did manage to demonstrate Winlink, by sending an email out to a few folks and I did a POTA activation at the park with the minimum 10 contacts.
Here is a QSO map.
It was a good day. I got to see some old friends and make some new ones. I was able to help a few get their rigs in order. I was able to sort through my own issues; better now than during a real EmComm event. After action? I resolved the tuner issue. I am going to sort my antennas a little differently and clean out my POTA/Portable box. I am always looking at what I use and what I use it with. The idea is to be able to efficiently setup a station without having to search high and low for things. A place for everything and everything in it’s place. 73’s Scott
kk4z.com 
I enjoyed your report. Wish I could have been there. What did you go over? Anything new that I might have missed? Since you were at the site, are there any trees there to erect antennas on? I was going to test out several portable antennas, had I gone, but might be able to swing a day/evening there by myself. Thanks.
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Would have liked to have seen you. I spent most of the time doing Q&A. I don’t think there was anything new that I covered. If you have a question, send me an email. There are plenty of trees around the periphery where we were. However, we were in a field that I don’t think is normally open to the public. Hope to catch you next time I am down that way.
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