Travel

I was traveling to DC the weekend of ARRL Field Day, so I found some time e-bike from the hotel to activate US-0655, the National Mall from a park bench at the mall. I clamped the GRA-1900T right to the bench. Field Day was happening, so traditional bands were very busy. I jumped to 17m for a quieter, POTA-only experience. The LiFePO4 battery hadn’t been charged in a while, so it went dead by the end of my activation. It was a bit of a race against the dwindling battery. With the battery completely exhausted, and running on the internal battery of the x6100, I got to 12 contacts.

I had played with the radio the night before. I tried my gra-1900T and the 12.5m EFRW in the hotel room. We were on the 9th floor of 10 floors in Downtown DC. I barely got out for a moment on 40m with the wire, then nothing. The whip did absolutely nothing.

I drove out to West Chester yesterday, but I’ve not bothered looking up and adding repeaters for the area. Instead, I could set the spectrum analyzer on the UV-K6 (or K5) to scan the 145MHz-148MHz, stepping on 5.00kHz, and I had a pretty good picture of any repeaters to hear out there.

Once I heard something, I could pop open RepeaterBook on my phone and see what it was, but it saved me lots of trouble programming anything into the radio ahead of time to not necessarily need it.

I took the Amtrak from Lancaster to Pittsburgh to visit Marie. In down times, I scanned with the spectrum analyzer on my UV-K5.

Rail

On the train, I scanned the rail frequencies, 159MHz-162MHz. I could hear some chatter about the Norfolk Southern freight trains in our way, and I heard the automated messages reporting clear track conditions.

CMU Buggy Net

Scanning the entire 2m band on Saturday morning, I heard the radio club kids running their regular net that supports buggy practices.