This year i planned to have much more activations with WWFF, POTA and SOTA. So far i have activated 3 WWFF and 2 POTA parks.

Here are some stories behind them, two of them i did with fellow operators.

Winter activation, Evo Retkeilyalue OHFF-0644 and POTA FI-0261

Me and OH2CKU Tapio started to plan activation trip early january. We end up a solution, that going somwhere in march, when it should not be so cold anymore.

I found out that part of Evo is for rent, there have been big events like scouts meeting where are around 10-20 thousand people. So that gave a thought to go there, because there is electricity available and it is inside of the activation area!

So i called to Finnish State-owned Forestry Company and rented area to ourself. It included keys to toilets and cooking shelter where we would have electricity available.

So finally it was time to go to Evo and because of some delays, Tapio was there before me.
Cooking shelter was quite big and because we have had some warm days, some snow melted to the floor and froze again. So needed to be careful there…

Luckily i took a big shovel with me because Tapio took really small field shovel with him… it still took like 2 hours to clean enough snow where we got our teepee up.

It was cozy inside because we had 2 tables, and i had foldable bed. Also 3kW electric heater which was good, since temperature dropped around -10 celcius lowest.

First day passed by quickly, we got our teepee up, made some food and relaxed after workday and driving.

We started saturday with building our station. We had 2 rigs, My ICOM IC-705 and Tapios IC-7300. We ended up using only 7300.

Antenna was HFKit EFHW for 80m-10m but Tapio also had his new Chameleon wire antenna which he wanted to test. HFkit had better performance during the weekend.

So we started to activate WWFF first, during the day i got over 130 qsos! Few P2P also. Propagations were in good and 100W helped a lot. Tapio took turn after me and he got around 60 qsos, mostly domestic stations. This was his first activation, he was a bit nervous…

I end up active POTA by calling stations from the cluster. Got total of 28 P2P qsos, 20 different parks. Some parks had 2 activators which operated with same radio. I was first one who worked this park in POTA.

My field bed broke suddenly on first day, but manage to fix it enough so i could sleep. Otherwise it was very good trip and got good experience.

Vehoniemi, Kangasala OHFF–0083

I tried to activate this park last year, but it was a big fail. Only 4 qsos. Props were terrible on that day and i had my JPC-12 vertical antenna with me only. Not sure how much antenna affect for performance.

Anyway, this time i worked this from my car, turned front seats all the way front and got my table inside. Door had enough cap so it didn’t sqeeze the coaxial. It was a bit rainy so i was comfortable inside.

I had my IC-705 with me and HFKit EndFed antenna. First qso was P2P with Tapio, who had first activation alone in Vantaa.

Started with usual, 80m first, 40m and 20m last. Then going back to 40m so get some domestic and nordic qsos more.

Was a quick day, got around 50 qsos fast and i was happy for it. Packed up and went to log one mystery geocache on my way home.

Hämeenkangas OHFF-0162 and POTA FI-0372

On our club meeting, we discuss to go activation together with Jouni OH3CUF. He wanted to go to Jämijärvi, where is a small airfield. There is a lot remote controlled plane hobbyists, and he wanted to meet them same time.

It is a large area so one idea was to get close to hotel, where is a small hill and we could camp to of it. Other idea was to go to Lean-To, where we could camp also. But since my tent weight was 7kg and had other gear with me, i wasn’t so happy about that idea.

We drove to Jämi on saturday, and on our way we found out that sun had bursts which affected to propagations.

So first parking place was a bit crowded and it was around 400 metre walk to lean-to… luckily i remembered that place is not open, so Jouni also decided that going near the hotel was a good choise.

So we carry our gear to of the hill anfter we had lunch in the hotel restaurant. Put muy tent up and tables, bed etc were quibkly set up. Jouni had his hammock set up 100 metres away from me so we wouldn’t cause any problems which being different bands same time.

I didn’t use mast for endfed antenna this time, insted i got end of the wire quite high up to the tree. I used mast for my 2m dipole antenna, just for testing it.

Couple of test qsos but we had to quit for awhile because of approaching thunderstorm.

After an hour, weather was calm and sunny again. So we started our activation. Jouni was using CW and SSB, i was using mostly SSB but also did some FT8 on sunday morning.

It was a bit challenging to qsos because props were not good. But still, some stations were heard well on 40m but not on 80m. 20m was bad, only very few qsos there. FT8 worked ok in 20m.

Almost 100 qsos total, 50 on saturday and sunday morning 48 qsos. So not bad. And 2m dipole worked well, got 2 qsos over 100km away. Also used 30W amp so that helped also a bit but Jouni used his handheld and got same stations to his log also.

Slept ok, eat ok and had good time. Too bad it started to rain when i was taking donw the tent. I was hoping that i didn’t need to dry it…. No room in my apartment this size of a tent….

Anyway, hope i got similiar kind of trip again soon!

On july i have my vacation time finally, planning to activate 2 OHFF parks and one of them is also SOTA! It will be my first SOTA activation. One OHFF is ATNO (All-Time New One) park so will be great experience.

See you in the bands! 73 de OG3E