I’ve watched a lot of POTA videos and I see guys with really modest equipment/antennas setting up and, shazam, dozens of contacts in an hour or two. Yeah, that’s not happening for me. I’ve tried to activate a couple of parks four or five times and while I’ve made contacts, I’m definitely the guy down in the weeds. Now, true, I did have some awesome QSOs from South Carolina all up and down the pacific coast - Washington, Oregon, California. So, nice. But, for sure, I needed a bit more. I’ve used both QRP rigs (Icom 705 on 10 w) and even a 100w radio, but my antenna solutions have been - for the most part - pretty crappy. I’ve had the most luck with a buddipole dipole on top of a 25’ mast/tripod setup (which was stolen out of the back of my truck a few weeks ago… grrrrr…). So I’ve transitioned to a vertical buddipole setup, although I’m fairly confident that I wasn’t getting the radials right. Then a dipole between two masts bungied to a tree. All in all, so-so performance. And the dipole took a ton of time to setup. So I did some reading online about the POTA Performer from KJ6ER and decided to build an antenna. My, how times have changed. Here I am building antennas and even thinking about learning CW. I guess what they say is right - the Extra ticket is a ticket to learn. It was pretty fun building the POTA Performer - I’m waiting on a few parts, but I should be on the air next weekend with it. I’ll post here about how it goes…
drive.google.com
PERformer Antenna by KJ6ER (2025-02).pdf
drive.google.com
