The 2023 Michigan QSO Party took place last Saturday, April 15. This year, I did something different. Instead of operating from home, where there are plenty of Washtenaw County stations, I decided to activate a less-populated county. Friends of my wife and I have a place near the beautiful Tawas Point State Park, and they graciously allowed us to use their place for the weekend. So, I packed up my KX-3 and headed “up north,” as we say here in Michigan.
The weather really cooperated. Like with most of the northern tier states, April weather can be hit and miss. Friday, it was sunny and in the 70s. On Saturday, it was bit cooler, but still sunny and nice.
We arrived in Tawas about 12:30 pm, stopped for lunch, and then headed over to the house. After unpacking the car, we put on some sunscreen and headed over to the beach. Being a weekday at the end of April, we had the beach all to ourselves. We walked around a bit, then unfolded our chairs and got an early start on our summer tans.
After heading back to the house, I set up my 66-ft. doublet antenna. My friend’s house has a couple of trees that were just about perfect for this. I was able to get the lines up about 20 feet with no problem at all. The wires drooped over the ends a bit, but that was OK.
Then, I set up the radio to check out the bands. The Friday afternoon edition of the K1USN SST was on, and 20-meter band conditions were pretty good, so I was able to make a number of contacts pretty easily.
Then, I decided to check out 15 meters, where I ran across N0GRA calling CQ. I answered his call, and we had a nice 25-minute ragchew, something that’s kind of unusual when you’re running low power.
After our QSO, I decided to set up the laptop that I brought with me (I normally use the desktop computer in my shack, but hauling that up north wasn’t an option) and test it out with the keyer and KX-3. I had tested this setup at home, but Murphy has a way of screwing things up, doesn’t he? I didn’t want to be flailing around at noon Saturday, trying to get everything to work.
Sure enough, I ran into a snag. Without an internet connection, I couldn’t sign in to the Windows 10 computer, and the house didn’t have WiFi. Yikes! After doing a little Internet searching, I found out that I could use a program called netplwiz to disable the need to enter a password, but I still had to sign in to run that program. The solution was to use my wife’s iPhone as a hotspot, sign in to the computer, and then run netplwiz and disable the need for a password. There was a lot more flailing involved, but I’ll spare you that part of the story.
After getting the station all set up and running, Silvia and I spent the rest of the evening watching “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” using the iPhone to stream the video.
I woke up early the next morning to a beautiful sunrise over Lake Huron:
The sunrise at this time of year is even more spectacular than during the summer because the trees haven’t leafed out yet.
I ate some breakfast and read some until noon, when I fired up the rig and got on the air. I got permission to use our club call sign again, so I was operating as W8RP. I have used KB6NU in the past, but it’s really better to use an 8-land call sign in the Michigan QSO Party.
I thought I’d start out on 20 meters, but unfortunately conditions weren’t as good as they were on Friday, and after 20 minutes, I’d only managed one contact with a station in Oregon. I could hear a bunch of DX stations, but they were all operating the CQMM DX Contest.
So, I switched to 40 meters. Normally, the antenna tuner in the KX-3 is able to achieve a 1:1 match on all the HF bands, but for some odd reason, the best it could do at this particular location was 1.6:1. I’m guessing that the problem was the metal flashing along the eaves. The way I’d hung the antenna it came pretty close to the eaves, and the metal was detuning the antenna on 40 meters. I’m normally one to try to get the SWR down as low as possible, but I wasn’t going to take down the antenna at this point and find another spot for it.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to. 40 meters was in decent shape, and with the skip being on the short side, I was able to work a bunch of Michigan counties, i.e. multipliers. I even worked some phone with my QRP rig, making a dozen phone contacts in all.
The phone contacts netted some multipliers that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. For example, just before 4 pm, I worked a station in Iron County, a small county in the Upper Penninsula, on the Wisconsin border. I joked with the operator that I was the only station in Iosco County, and he said that he was the only ham in Iron County.
After that contact, I decided to take a break. Silvia and I made some sandwiches and headed over to the state park. It was a little on the chilly side with the wind coming off the lake, but we enjoyed our dinner and the great views the park provided. We even noted that farther down the beach, there was a family, and the kids were in the water! Brrrrr.
I got back on the air about 6:30 pm and operated until 9 pm. The skip was still on the short side, and I was able to log more counties, including Benzie, Barry, Isabella, and Ontonagon Counties. I logged a few more states, too, including Rhode Island and Florida.
Overall, I made 130 contacts and had a total score of 15,960. This included contacts with 43 counties, or about half of the counties in Michigan. Activity seemed to be down overall, but I think that I had a decent score. The best thing, though, was to be able to combine a nice weekend on the lake with a little ham radio.
Dave New, N8SBE says
Nice write up, Dan. Last year, we closed out the camping season at Aloha start park, and we practically had the park to ourselves, which was just as well, because the full hook-up area had very small turns and room to back the rig in. If I hadn’t been able to pull forward into the empty space across from us I don’t think I would have done very well siting the camper.
I worked the QSO party this year from home, and managed 150 contacts over about 5.25 hours of operating. Like you, I took a long break in the late afternoon. You had very good timing, because a flare blacked out all the low bands for a couple of hours, and was just starting to recover after dinner-time. I then quit early, about 10pm , because the QRN on 80M was so bad from a band of lightning that stretched all the way from Houston to Chicago. I only made about 12 contacts, because I couldn’t hear anyone else, and I had worked just everyone there was to work on 40m. I just kept hearing dupes over and over.