N8T – National Trails Day Recap - We had considerable excitement at the N8T event Saturday.  A youngster got separated from her family out on the trail.  The hiking club sponsoring the hiking activity (including Bart, KC7YGQ, who was helping at the radio at the time) searched the wilderness zone pretty intensely, but finally called in Search & Rescue.  S&R found her - she had crossed the river (out of the wilderness zone), followed a feeder stream up to the main road and was walking away from the hiking area when found by a search dog team.  Made for a very long, very intense day!  On the for-future-reference side, we were actually able to maintain contact with Bart for most of his route via simplex and we did communicate some useful logistical info with just his ht/rubber duck from a mobile, and we could have maintained complete zone coverage with a pair of mobiles, one at the parking lot and another along the back access road.  We also had feedback from the Hiawatha club Rapid Response Team that it might be possible for the hiking club to borrow some Alzheimer’s patient RF tracing tags for future events to make it simpler to locate lost hikers.  This suggestion has been forwarded.

The HF bands were in stunningly bad conditions during the day, and the event, above, and the advent of mosquitoes later in the day kept us distracted.  25 hard-won QSO's, including 10 via PSK 3 local 2meter, and 1 via CW.  Had contacts in Michigan, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut (W1AW, by golly!), Maryland (mobile), New Jersey, West Virginia, Tennessee, Florida and Alabama (Alabama QSO party going on).  The east coast contacts were off the ends of the wire antenna.  We weren’t alone in our frustrations – we heard comments over the air all day about how bad the bands were, and many of the stations we did hear on were running 500 watts or more.

We did have some technical successes, however.  The ez-up shelter we used has a bug screen that worked very well.  The wire antenna went up (along with the shelter) Friday night and survived pretty stormy conditions overnight with a pair of sandbags weighting the portable base.  We guyed against the expected wind conditions successfully.  The rig was powered by our 110ah marine battery for 10 hours with no drop in power.  We ran the PSK computer and the Rigblaster interface from the 17 ah battery in the car battery booster box successfully, with a twist.  The booster box has an internal inverter, but it generated a fair amount of RF hash so we connected an older Radio Shack plug-in inverter to the 12vdc connector and ran a power strip off of that.  I suspect that the external inverter consumed some extra power (it gets fairly warm), but we kept the systems working.  Oh yes – I remembered all the plugs and cables necessary to make PSK work this time, too, and that’s a definite improvement!  Clearly time to consider a PSK interface that does not require external power, such as the Rigblaster USB.  Also, Marge, KD8AIL, did another wizard job on the qsl card, pictured here:

Thanks! to all the hams who helped/endured the event, including: Marge, KD8AIL, Dave, KD8RDF, Dave, KC8UUC, Bart, KC7YGQ, Tom, KD8FDS and Kurt (taking the test on the 14^th!) and to the North Country Trial Hikers (Marge, Jan, Jim, Lorana, Bill and Cliff) who stuck it out during the gathering darkness and swarms of mosquitoes to help tear down the site in record time.

(1)Dave, KC8UUC, (2) PSK ops, (3)Tom, KD8FDS scoring W1AW, (4) basic setup: phones, rig, key, atomic clock, logging pad, desk mike.