A little different POTA activation

Normally, I do a POTA activation with my KX-3 powered by a 9-Ahr battery. I run 15 W and mostly operate CW. I make plenty of contacts with this setup, but Paul, KW1L, one of my partners in crime, speculated if we’d do any better with a 100 W rig. Since I have access to an IC-7300, I suggested that we cart that out to K-3315, Island Lake Recreation Area next time.

Well, next time was yesterday. We had talked about running the IC-7300 from my battery, but I didn’t get around to building the necessary cables in time. Instead of the battery, we also hauled out an Astron 20A power supply, which we connected to the AC at the picnic shelter. After some futzing around with the antenna and with the mic gain and compressor controls, we were on the air.

In addition to using a different rig, we operated a different mode. We started out on 40-meter phone, and we had so much luck making contacts, we just stuck with it. Over the next hour and a half, we made 44 contacts. At that point, we decided to tear down and have lunch.

For the most part, we were running 90 W. After about 20 contacts, Paul suggested trying a lower power, so I cranked it back to 50 W. We were still making contacts at 50 W, so Paul suggested setting the power even lower. When I cranked it back to 25 W, we noticed that it was harder to copy us, so I set the power back to 90 W.

As we were setting up, we had a couple of visitors (see photo above). I love sand hill cranes and was amazed at how tame they were. They didn’t seem afraid of us at all. They got within ten feet of us before realizing that we weren’t going to give them any food and wandering off.

A simple logging solution

When out on a POTA activation, I use an ARRL Mini Logbook. I like this logbook because it’s small and lays flat on the table because it’s spiral bound. The problem is that I have to create an ADIF file to upload to the POTA website and to include the contacts in my master log.

I have been just using a text editor to manually edit an ADIF file. This works, but it takes a while, especially if I have a lot of contacts.

A thought occurred to me yesterday to write a program that would take form input and output the ADIF. Since many of the fields, such as frequency, band, and mode, don’t change from contact to contact, the program would simply populate the form with the previous entry’s data. That way, all one would have to do is enter the data, such as call sign and signal reports, that do change.

I know how to do this in PHP and HTML, but I was thinking of something that didn’t require me to be online. I also thought about doing this with Python. Not only should this be possible, but it would be a good exercise for me to learn Python.

I asked for suggestions on Mastodon, and someone suggested Fast Log Entry (FLE) by DF3CB. I used this program yesterday to create an ADIF file for all my contacts, and I must say that it’s a great program. There are a couple of drawbacks, though. For one thing, you can’t add fields. I’d like to include a STATE field, but I don’t think that I can do this. Second, it only runs on a PC, and it would be nice if I could do this on my Mac.

So, I may proceed with my Python project or just do it online and put it here on KB6NU.Com. Stay tuned for that.