The Fox Mike Hotel Portable Operations Challenge

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Getting on air and making noise is what it's all about, so last week, that's exactly what we did. Randall VK6WR, Jishnu VK6JN and I participated in the Fox Mike Hotel Portable Operations Challenge which is specifically scored to deal with power and mode differences between stations by using a handicap system that they liken to playing golf. Having been the winner of the Sir Donald Bradman Award in the Millmerran Memorial Golf Tournament for making the highest score on the day, this speaks to me in more ways than I can say. In case you're wondering, more hits in golf is bad and I'm not a golfer.

Scoring in the Portable Ops Challenge is based around four different attributes, the power you're using, the nature of your station, portable or fixed, the mode used and the number of transmitters in use.

To achieve this, you exchange a maidenhead grid square, a combination of letters and numbers that indicates your location on earth, which is then used to determine how many kilometres per Watt are used to make the contact.

If you're portable, you get a multiplier benefit in the scoring.

Depending on the perceived difficulty of the contact, you score more points. In this case, SSB is harder than CW, which in turn is harder than a digital mode.

Finally, the more transmitters you have, the less each contact is worth. Two transmitters, means you score half the points for each.

With that in mind, a QRP portable station with a single transmitter calling CQ on SSB is the best way to make points and that is something that I'm always up for.

In our adventure, we opted for a slight change, instead using FT4 and FT8, using 40 Watts, portable, on the side of a hill in a local park and during the four hours we were active, we managed six contacts, one over SSB, the rest using digital modes and we all had several goes at getting the best out of our station.

Our set-up consisted of a small folding table next to my car with a computer, a radio and a thermos flask with hot tea to ward off the chill in the air. Power was supplied by an 80 AH battery. The radio was an Icom IC-7300 that Randall brought along.

The antenna we used was a Terlin Outbacker, multi-tap whip that was attached to my car with a 12m counterpoise run along the gutter.

None of us had ever seen such excellent conditions with such a low noise floor in the middle of the city. We were enjoying the last warm sun of the day from Kings Park in Perth, Western Australia. It's a 990 acre park, larger than Central Park in New York, set aside for public use in 1831 and gazetted as a public park in 1872. The park is open 24 hours a day and features a botanic garden with thousands of species of Western Australia's native flora and fauna, overlooks the central business district, the Swan River and the Darling Ranges and best of all, there's no radio noise. It did get chilly towards the end, but I'm pretty sure we all went home with all our fingers and toes intact.

Jishnu also brought along his FT-817 and a tiny multi-tap telescopic whip that we strapped to a nearby steel rubbish bin and using that set-up was able to detect and transmit WSPR signals across the globe as part of experimentation with his station.

One of the unexpected benefits of not yelling CQ into a microphone ad-nauseam was that we were able to continue our conversation, hearing stories from each other and enjoying hot pizza when dinnertime came around without needing to stuff food into the same place where CQ calls were intended to originate.

My car isn't quite ready to go completely portable, but this little outing again proved to me that portable vehicle based operation has a charm all its own and the Fox Mike Hotel Portable Operations Challenge is going to be on my dance card next time it comes around!

When was the last time you left your shack and went portable?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB