It all started innocently enough. A nice fall weekend at Cheaha State Park to camp and operate my radios. While there I was planning on finishing up my POTA Kilo Award for this park.
Things started happening right at the time I got to the park. My reservation got messed up and I had to to take another campsite. This campsite was further from the comfort station bu at a higher elevation. Even at the higher elevation, cell service was very spotty which added to the wild weekend.
Getting setup, I put up my 28.5′ random wire antenna with a 17’counterpoise. I used a homemade 9:1 UnUn with a 1:1 current balun to feed my IC-7300 (Peter II). In between was my trusty LDG Z-11 Pro. I ran FT8 at 35 watts.
As soon as I started operating, things began to get squirrelly. I normally start on 20 meters in the afternoon and then drop down the bands as night falls often going back to 20 in the late evening. That didn’t happen. I only stayed on 20 for a little while before jumping down to 40, for most of the rest of the evening. This was not going to be a typical campout/POTA Activation. The next day I spent time on 20 but the MUF appeared to be much higher as I crept up the bands all the way to 10 meters. Typically, during an activation, 20 meters is my money band but this time 40 meters was the winner. Of the 465 contacts I made, 197 were on 40m meters and 157 were on 20 meters. I worked 46 states (except AK,CT,ND, and NH) and 15 dx entities. I had some interesting DX. I worked Germany, Portugal, Spain and Canada on 10 meters; Spain, Italy, and France on 12 meters; Samoa, New Caledonia, Ukraine, and Romania on 30 meters; and Hawaii on 40 meters. See the QSO Map.
On my home, when I got back to full service, I started receiving emails from the prior day from the SWPC with a bunch of Geomagnetic Storm Alerts. That explained the wild times on the bands. It was fun trying to figure out were to go to catch the propagation. I did manage to complete 3 Kilo awards before I left the park. The moral of the story is bad solar conditions can bring some surprising DX results. 73 de Scott
KK4Z 