We had a surprise opportunity to go to the beach this weekend, near Southport NC.

[mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info]

We had a surprise opportunity to go to the beach this weekend, near Southport NC. I have the weird preference to sling my hammock under the house, between the clotheslines, instead of sleeping indoors. Half camping? I use a big rubbermaid box as my "suitcase" and put my shoes on it overnight... It was cold at night, but an underquilt and reflecting bubble insulation in the hammock, with an inflatable mattress on top of my down sleeping bag, kept me cozy.

My wife and I went to Fort Fisher State Recreation Area and set up a pair of #HamRadio transceivers. Because this weekend was SSB CQ World Wide DX contest, she couldn't find an empty space to call CQ, and had trouble breaking through pileups, so after a few QSOs she decided it wasn't fun any more and read a book. It was not the CW CQ DX contest weekend, so I successfully activated US-3842 with Morse code. Then back at the beach house, I kept ducking out onto the porch to hunt #POTA operators using CW, with a 33' random wire antenna hanging from a spiderbeam pole, connected to the 9:1 port on my tiny little homebrew QRP dual-port unun. One of those QSOs was with the ham who sold me my KX3 that I used to make the contact! 🎉

I gave the random wire a workout with QSOs on 40, 30, 20, 17, and 15 meters. Tried hunting with no luck on 80, 12, and 10 meters.

The wind eventually broke the antenna wire off the terminal, so I'll want to fix that before going out again. But at the beach, it was easy to bodge that by stripping back a bit of insulation and screwing the bare wires in the terminal.