Radio Road Trip

  This weekend I went down to the south-eastern corner of the State on a camping trip, and I included amateur radio in the adventure. 

  My destination was Beaver Creek Valley State Park, near Caledonia, MN. Friends and family were gathering at a group site for a three-day campout in a beautiful section of the State. Known as "Bluff Country", it's unlike anywhere else in Minnesota: high hills, low valleys, spring-fed trout streams, and hardwood forests. 

  This kind of topography, as you could imagine, makes for a challenging radio environment. My cell phone stopped receiving a signal almost as soon as I left I-90, for example. I've made this trip several times, but never as a licensed ham, and I was eager to explore the repeaters along the way and even into Bluff Country itself. 

  I left the metro with my 10W Leixen VV-898 dual-band and a trunk-mounted dual-band Browning whip and my phone sending my locations to APRS-IS. I brought along a longer, two-metre only whip for the return trip, too. 

  The first repeater that I ran into outside of the metro was the 147.360+ (136.5 PL) in Hampton (near Northfield). K0JTA (Mike) came back to my sign, and I chatted with him until I was on the other side of the hill near Cannon Falls. Mike runs the repeater, which reaches into the southern metro. I can't usually reach it from Plymouth with a whip at my condo, so it was a new repeater to me, anyway. It has a very long squelch tail, and I kept waiting for the repeater to drop in my QSO. Mike explained that this was deliberate. It was the heating and cooling cycle of the transmitter coming up and dropping out that created wear and tear on a repeater, per Mike. He also told me that he only had "ten or twenty" watts going into the antenna, which was surprising given the range and signal quality. It was a nice QSO, and I began to feel a bit more confident that I would have some company on the radio along the way. 

  Sadly, this was premature. I didn't have the Northfield or Red Wing repeaters programmed in to my radio, and I wasn't about to enter them "on the fly" while driving. The next up was the Rochester 146.820- (100.0 PL), which I had been told was the most active. I could hear its voice ID announcing the time or temperature from a quite a distance along Hwy 52, but I wasn't able to 'ker-chunk" it until I was almost in to Rochester. The word "alligator" was coming to mind, but I was only running ten watts. Absolutely no one came back to my repeated calls. Again, as I passed Rochester, I could hear the ID for quite a distance -- but no other activity. This repeater was supposed to cover me as far as the entrance to Bluff Country. 

  As I travelled down I-90, I lost my cell coverage and emerged into the challenging topography that would make further explorations difficult. On a whim, I set my radio for the repeater in La Crescent (across the Mississippi River from La Crosse). The 146.970- (131.8 PL) machine was over 25 miles away in this terrain, and I could hear an ID! I wouldn't be able actually "ker-chunk" it until I reached Rockford, but I had a repeater available where I didn't expect to. 

  Of course, repeated thrown signs brought no results, nor did I hear any local traffic. I tried simplex on 146.520 a few times, but found no one on the other end. The 146.970 machine dropped out several times as I descended into steep valleys on snake-like, twisting roads, but it always popped back like a determined (but silent) friend. I was amazed to find that I could actually "ker-chunk" this quiet machine even from within the deep valley of the state park itself! 

  When I walked in to the campsite, I found a somewhat smaller-than-expected group: only nine (including myself) made the trip for a weekend that was expected to be rainy. There were also three dogs, which were having the time of their canine lives. Of the nine, two were very small children (six and two), who turned out to be quite the troopers. The park was full, but we had a relatively gigantic and secluded walk-in group site to ourselves.

  I had brought two dual-band HTs, as I expected that people would be off doing separate things over the course of the day. I knew from previous experience that GMRS worked well within the park itself, and even better when one of those people was on the trails that run along the rim of the valley comprising the park. But I also figured that MURS (being VHF) would suffer less from green-leaf attenuation. Since I was the only licensed person there, I settled on MURS for our group's communications needs. It worked well, though a defective speaker mic caused some initial confusion. We did, however, chuckle over some of the GMRS/FRS chatter that was fairly frequent. There were even some evening conversations with other campers, and the two children were quite intrigued by these "toys". 

  The lack of a speaker mic proved to be a challenge for adults and children alike. I was amazed to have to explain the push-to-talk button on the side of the radio -- repeatedly -- whereas the speaker mic was relatively straightforward and obvious in its operation. I really regretted not bringing a second mic, as it was small enough to fit into the children's hands. 

  When I did hand one of the HTs to the six-year-old, he put the speaker up to his ear and started talking into the keyboard -- as if he were on a cell phone! This amused me to no end, of course. 

  In an environment like that, with no cell coverage, everyone saw the value of two-way radio. The means, however, turned out to be baffling, unfamiliar, and mysterious -- even to adults. This doesn't bode well for the future of the hobby. That's why I see GMRS as such a fantastic gateway. One licence covers your whole family, allowing you to use mobiles or portables, repeaters or simplex. It's an excellent way to expose children to two-way radio, making a move into amateur radio a viable and less daunting possibility. Next time, I'll make sure to bring working speaker mics. Aside from reaching a dead repeater, I can see no advantage that amateur radio would have allowed over MURS or GMRS in that situation. We actually had other people to talk with on GMRS, which we wouldn't have with ham radio. Maybe an extra couple of watts on two-metre FM simplex would have been nice, but not compelling enough to expect people to get their Tech licence and wade into the insane and arcane world that many hams live in. 

  On the trip back, I finally managed to raise someone on the 146.970- machine in La Crescent. It was KC9LBO (Ralph) that broke radio silence, mostly because he thought that I needed directions or local information. Ralph turned out to be a decent enough guy, and I picked his brains on the local radio scene. He kind of thought that the .970 was on a commercial tower, and he didn't use the UHF linked network in Wisconsin much. Outside of nets, there didn't seem to be much activity, though he confirmed that the .970 had strong coverage. For the return trip, I had switched over to the VHF-only whip. There weren't any UHF machines around, and the longer monoband whip improved coverage into several of the smaller valleys that were dead zones with the dual-band whip. Ralph let me go somewhere between Houston and Rockford, and I thanked him for the QSO. 

  The improved whip let me "ker-chunk" the (now dead) .970 as I got back on to I-90, but I still couldn't get in to the Rochester 146.820 machine until I was nearly to Chatfield. I threw out my sign several times before KC0GND (Bob) must have become tired of listening to me and came back. Bob seemed unwilling to be coaxed into conversation, but he did tell me that the repeater had been having receiver problems "lately". Later, as I got into the metro, KA0PQW (Matt) informed me that those receiver problems had been present for years. I had counted on the .820 to be my main connection on my travels, and it was a big disappointment. 

  Next, I moved into range of the Owatonna 147.150+ (100.0 PL) wide area coverage repeater. Outfitted with EchoLink, and being near both I-35 and I-90, I expected good things from this machine. I threw out my sign and got a clear return signal. Then there was a voice that rapidly rattled off a mostly-mumbled callsign, there were a few DTMF tones... and the repeater went dead. Suddenly, I was unable to even "ker-chunk" it. Brilliant. 

  This was supposed to be the repeater that would carry me a good deal of the way north. Instead, I switched over to FM simplex. I was surprised to find someone named Wade (callsign forgotten -- sorry) come back. Wade had a 13-element beam, which made working my puny 10W rig a breeze. We chatted for a while, and Wade told me that activity was very low in the area. He also did some two-metre SSB, and we talked about that until he handed me off to another simplex station. This was Jeff (callsign forgotten, too), a retired plasterer that had just put up a new vertical antenna. He was pleased to put it to the test, though it was tougher to make it in without the other person having a beam. Jeff took me nearly in to Faribault. 

  I didn't have the Faribault repeater programmed in, so I tried some VHF simpex to no avail for quite a distance. At some point, I began to hear the IDs of the metro repeaters like far-off foghorns. The 146.700 "ker-chunked" first, like an old friend, and others soon followed. Before long, I was having a QSO on the 145.450, and my radio road trip was coming to an end.