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Coyote Peak can be a SOTA + POTA activation area

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Coyote Peak:  SOTA + POTA Jun, KG6YJ Coyote Peak (SOTA reference number W6/NC-399) is inside Santa Teressa County Park. When hiking along the trail to the peak, you may notice 2 signs beside the trail:                 The second sign shows this trail is  Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail , a 1,210-mile national historic trail  extending from Arizona to California. I t is a POTA (Parks On The Air) entity,  K-4571 , a  POTA activation can be done within 100 feet distance of this trail. If we look at the official map of Santa Teressa County Park , we can see this POTA trail passes right beside Coyote Peak: A zoom-in view is easier to see: The historic trail is highlighted as Yellow color, while Coyote Peak is highlighted as Red color in both above maps. Now let's look at the SOTA Activation Zone of Coyote Peak, courtesy of N6ARA's great website : You can see this historic trail does pass the SOTA activation zone. By using Google Maps' distance measurement function
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My DIY BCI filter - a beauty!

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  My DIY BCI filter – a beauty! In late March, I was testing Xiegu G106 on a small hill in a nearby park. I could hear the same broadcasting song across all the bands, no matter how I tuned G106. Obviously that was front-end overloading caused by AM broadcasting. I decided to build a BCI filter. A few days later, in early April, I built my DIY BCI filter, it works very well together with G106! What a coincidence, my friend N6HAN shared a link from K4SWL showing his DIY BCI filter , it looks like an elephant inside a snake. Then I shared mine to N6HAN, it’s a beauty! Heat-shrink tube is really something awesome! Ha ha!
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My First SKCC WES

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  My First SKCC WES (Weekend Sprintathon) - March 11, 2023, Saturday. I'm a new CW op, recently became a SKCC member (#27223), this is the first time to do SKCC WES. On Saturday I was tuning my DIY trail EFHW antenna in the backyard: Finished trail EFHW antenna Half wavelength stealth antenna wire pulled up by a fishing pole, forming an inverted V RG316 coaxial cable -- 1:49 UNUN transformer -- half wavelength stealth antenna wire I used my DIY paddle key as a straight key to hunt a few POTA and SOTA, and then did 2 SKCC WES QSO's, nice! DIY iambic paddle key used as a straight key My 1st QSO was with K7GUD (23806s), after sending his name "PAT" he mentioned "b" which means a bug key he was using. My 2nd QSO was with KS1KCC (20550s), he sent his name "SKCC", I thought "What? Is this a human name?" Then I asked him to re-send his name, he sent "SKCC" again... Later I realized it was the KS1KCC club callsign! HI HI. This week'
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My First CW Ragchew

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  My First CW Ragchew March 9, 2023   I started to do CW QSO from January 2023, but only limited to short ones, mainly POTA/SOTA hunting and activation and SST (Slow Speed Test). In these QSO’s, the exchanges are simple and barebone. For POTA/SOTA, only callsign is necessary to exchange, even RST report is not that important, QTH (state/province abbreviation) and other information are optional. For SST, callsign, name and QTH are needed. Usually these QSO’s only cost about less than a minute. A new op doing S&P can listen the runner’s QSO’s with other hams for a while to copy his/her callsign and other information before calling the runner, this will reduce the new op’s copying workload during QSO quite a lot. Ragchew, on the other hand, is a longer QSO in a casual and friendly manner, usually longer than 30 minutes. More information are exchanged in a ragchew, for example: actual RST report, name, QTH (city/town name), RIG, power, ANT, height, weather, temperature, etc. En
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W6/CV-006 Campbell Mountain – 1st SOTA Activation

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- activated by KG6YJ on Feb.16 and Feb.17, 2023, UTC. Campbell Mountain is in the Central Valley of California, the closest big city is Fresno. I’m so happy to be the first activator of this mountain. It’s a private property, a permit is needed to access, hike and do SOTA activation there. For those who just want to know how to get there and get permit, you may skip the "Research and Planning" section and jump to Drive to Campbell Mountain .
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