Road Trip Update - August 15, 2021 FN22 Cooperstown, NY

FN22 is in the center of New York state.  It is a farming area.  For the first time on my trip the operating location was within walking distance of my RV campsite.  This campground was part of a farm.

The photo below is the view from my RV to the operating location.  The antennas are pointed in the Moonrise direction.  I put the 6M beam up and I was heard on the Packet Spotter across the eastern US from Minnesota to Louisianna to Florida and most places between.  Not many callers.

Here is the view looking back at my RV that is directly behind the antennas.

I had four visitors during the activation left to right N2JJ, W9IP, K2ZJ and K1PTF.  They arrived about an hour before the activation and stayed for the first couple of hours.  Two of the operators are experienced EME operators and two are just getting started.  I am going to provide a "Parts List" of what I have settled on based on operations over the last 18 months.

This is a working farm.  The machine is a wheat harvesting machine that made quick work of the wheat field.  No detectable RF noise :-).  On the next day a hay bailing machine bailed the wheat plant shafts in hay bails.

Some radio was done.  Difficult conditions.  Many stations called me who were not hearing me which was part of the challenge.  I guess EME isn't supposed to be easy.  At the beginning when signals appeared I had a waterfall of speaker readable signals.  Then over time conditions became more and more challenging.  I think the low moon elevation in EU made things harder because of local or urban noise at low elevations.  I was hearing better than I was being heard.  This was the first time I tried an activation with this level of southern declination.  It was an experiment.  If I try an activation like this again I will turn off chat and operate in the blind so I don't need to watch :-)

After completing 2M operations and surrendering to Faraday, we snuck onto 222.  Very deep fading and visible rotation.  Every 15 minutes or so signals would rotate from HPOL to VPOL to cross polarized.  I was able to complete with two stations, one of them right during a beautiful sunset.

Overall I was on the air for 6 hours with 27 total QSOs.  I think this is the lowest QSO count per hour I have had.

One of the reasons I do this is to see sights like this.  A beautiful sunset right when N0AKC and I completed a 222 EME QSO after trying everything for an hour.

Maybe the problem was how small the moon was?  The tiny white dot just above and to the left of the mast is the target for the 2X16 222 antennas.  I switch between HPOL and VPOL by manually rotating the antennas.  I can rotate the antennas during the 12 second inter-period gap between messages.

The weather is great and the location is very quiet, until they feed the dairy cattle at 6:00 AM.

I am not planning to be on the Moon again until the last week of August around August 26th.  I am heading west to the confluence of Nebraska, South Dakota and Iowa in EN12.  I will do several activations from grids in that area.

I will then go to North Dakota then to Michigan.  In Michigan I will start in the Upper Penninsula.  I will activate as many of the following grids as possible:

EN57, EN67, EN56, EN66, EN65, EN76, EN75 and EN86

I plan to start on September 2nd and operate as many days as I can until September 10th.  Some of the days will be during the New Moon.  Earlier on the trip we did ok during the New Moon so I hope the same will be true here.  Degradation and declination should be OK for EU during this period.

A reminder about QSL's.  If you send them to Ian you will get a fast response.  If you send them to my home address it could take much longer.

QSL Manager - For KA6U Paper QSLs

Ian Parker has offered to act as a QSL manager for me for paper QSLs.  He has cleared the QSL backlog from the last few months and will provide much faster response than I have :-).  I will send him my logs daily.  I will post the logs to LoTW.

For fast QSL response please send QSL requests to:

Ian Parker, W6TCP
37 Mountain View Ave

San Jose, CA 95127 USA