The derelict fire lookot tower on the summit of Frazier Mountain.
14 MAY 2022 W6/CC-003
This weekend trip was conceived and executed as a shake down run for my “gridpedition” to maidenhead grid DM17 in Nevada next weekend. This was a far different endeavor than my usual SOTA excursions mostly due to the fact that I wanted to bring along my Elecraft K3/100 and all the gear required to run a full soundcard digital station. This meant a lot more power than my little 3AH Bioenno LiPo battery could manage.
This was my third trip up Frazier Mountain and it is a pretty good place to do a big activation like this. On my last trip up here on November 25, 2020 I met Brian WA6JFK and Scott WA9STI. Scott had quite a bit of gear. He was running 100 watts from his KX3 and he also had 2.3 GHz gear.
This time around I brought two flooded lead-acid deep cycle marine batteries along with a 40AH Bioenno LiPo and a LOT of other gear. Pretty much everything I was going to take on the Nevada trip
I left on Friday afternoon from Topanga and, without any kind of campground reservation, was a bit nervous about finding a legitimate place to camp. I had seen that the Mount Pinos Campground campsites that could be reserved in advance were all filled. With only 5 other sites open for “day of” taking, I decided not to press my luck coming in late in the day, so I went over to the Chuchupate Campground on the road to Frazier Mountain.
To my very pleasant surprise I found that there was only one other party in this lovely campground. So I practically had the place to myself.
As expected, I forgot a few things. This wasn’t any big deal on this trip, but it would’ve been a big hassle way out in the Nevada wilderness the next weekend. One of the big kinks worked out of my system was powering the laptop. Because I was charging it on the Whitedog’s truckbed AC outlet, I didn’t want to run the truck that much. To prolong the battery life of the laptop I turned the screen brightness down. This made the screen very had to see — even in the shade. I’ve since figured out that the 40AH Bioenno LiPo will power an AC inverter very well. The Coleman inverter isn’t the cleanest and does create a lot of RF hash visible in the waterfall, but this is still a much better solution.
The propagation on HF was very strange with a lot of very steep and deep QSB. I did make a lot of contacts on FT8 – 30 in fact – including one to SA4BLM in Sweden. PSK-31 was not so bountiful. Only 3 contacts there and I had a lot of people from the PODX 070 Club looking for me. I hope next weekend is a lot better.
Because I operated off on on for over 7 hours, I had a lot of total contacts – 51 to be exact. I think that might be a record for me. I had a whopping 11 summit-to-summit exchanges.
A big, booming THANK YOU to all who chased. You all make this so much fun.
I also brought Chester the drone along and got some lovely aerial shots. Here is a little 2 minute video that points out some of the mountains surrounding Frazier Mountain over the derelict fire lookout tower:
KG6MZS 