Hoosier National Forrest

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The collection of text and photographs below attempt to serve a sort of documentation to the camping trip Nathan Webster and I (Timothy Toroni) took over the first weekend of February 2003, the same weekend of the tragic loss of the space shuttle Columbia.
I have scanned in the QSL cards I have received from this trip.

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After hiking about 6 miles we put our packs down and scrambled to setup the radio for a prearranged contact with our friend KB9MWE but failed to make contact. I guess we were a little for far for ground-wave comms but to close for the first bounce.

We didn't hike out as far as we had intended to. Reason being the car didn't make it up a hill on the way to our intended departure point due to the snow on the ground. This resulted in trip adventure #1. After the car was turned around we failed to get up the hill we just went down. So we were apparently stuck in a low place between to hills. Dirt, sticks, and pushing finally prevailed and we parked the car at the next parking area and walked the down the same road about 2 miles to our intended destination from which we walked another 4 or so miles into the woods. Fortunately for us by the time the weekend was over the snow had melted enough that we were able to get out of the park as there were other hills that we went down and giving our newfound experience, probably wouldn't have made it back out without more physical motivations to the car.

We used a simple inverted-vee dipole at about 36 feet for most of our 18 contacts. You can kind of see the west-side element in the photo. The elements ran east-west (the camera is pointed east in this photo), again our plan here was to be able to contact our friend north of us in Indianapolis. Surprisingly many of our contacts were on the east coast so who knows what sort of radiation pattern we had. Perhaps it was just there were several QSO parties during our camping trip which increased activity?

Later on we ran a small long-wire north-south and made two or three contacts on it. I was a bit unsure about radiation effects of the longwire since it was only 4 ft off the group and right next to us so we eventually went back to the dipole.

We used an SGC SG-2020 running at 20 watts with an MFJ-971 Antenna Tuner. Power was provided by a 7.5 Ah 12 volt sealed lead-acid battery - which incidently lasted the entire trip, probably because I lugged out two more 5 Ah 12 volt sealed lead-acid batteries too.

The results with the setup were very pleasing. I purchased the 2020 at the 2002 Ft. Wayne hamfest. This was no small feat considering all the anguish I went through deciding between the 2020 and the Yeasu 817. I was quite torn between the two rigs but finally decided since I wanted a portable HF rig I'd buy a portable HF radio - a rugged heavy duty one no less and I'm very happy with this choice. Sometimes I wonder about the all-in-one type products and am glad for the 20 watts output. The 817 is 5 watts out max although I hear it is a very nice radio.

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