CN75 trip report
ba...@k7bwh.com
CN75 Rover Trip Report
Barry Hansen K7BWH
I’m back home again in Seattle after three days in Lincoln City, OR, to activate CN75 which is (was!) the #2 most-wanted grid on 6 meters.
The target destination was a city park hilltop known as The Knoll. It’s the only place with a decent horizon in this tiny sliver of land in a grid chockablock full of Pacific Ocean. (Check out the map.) The Knoll requires hiking with a portable station so, with that in mind, I brought luggable stuff: 10-watt IC-705, painter’s pole, laptop and 12v battery. After scouting this hillock on the first evening, it turned out the ‘hike’ is a lovely well-maintained forest trail, but it’s as steeply upward as a serious unbroken unending steep staircase for a half mile. It needs younger legs than mine to carry gear up there.
I operated all three days from my camper van in the Logan Road RV park. (Hint: the CN74-75 grid line goes through the RV parking lot but that one parking spot #13 was occupied. Darn.) I ran with 100 watts in the RV park: a barefoot IC-7300 and the moxon. I must admit it was super nice to have shore power, shelter, bathrooms, and short walk to stores and restaurants and Starbucks and a casino from there.
My first two days on the air were complete doldrums, like there was an RF suppressor field. Maybe there was – a coronal mass ejection had just arrived, and it was very difficult to work the next grid over. I was starting to question my life choices. Then the skies opened on my last day and made it all worthwhile. BIC for the win.
Final score:
- 1 last-grid, Matt W3UUM in Texas EL29 (easy contact on FT4, no less)
- 1 next-to-last grid, Jim K5ND in Texas EM12 (read his blog post here)
- 1 Japan contact
- 1 Seattle contact (Seattle is nearly impossible during all my several trips to CN75, but Sid AB9BH managed it)
- 3 out of the 5 “elite’ leaders on the Gridzilla list
- 3 days enjoying fresh 65-degree ocean breeze while the inland sweltered at 100
- At least 45 FFMA leaders worked, by my hand count
- Over 175+ contacts, almost all on the last afternoon in one giant spasm
- Dozens of double-hop contacts to the East Coast
- Many dozens of Midwest contacts
- Enough stations chasing CN75 to dim the national power grid
The interesting part was the pileup with 20+ decodes every sequence. We successfully moved everyone from FT8 over to FT4. This was fun - I have never worked so many WSJT people so quickly on 6m. I had to let WSJT pick the caller by “max distance” and sometimes “max dB” to clear the queue as quickly as possible. Contacts happen too fast for me to manually pick the caller and keep every sequence full. And then my wife called during the whole chaos, lol.
I believe I would’ve made more contacts but there was a massive opening from the East Coast to Europe. I wish more of them had turned west; the path was there. This was their last chance at CN75 for a while.
Everyone, please update your Most-Wanted spreadsheet and Gridzilla data. I’m eager to see how far CN75 falls down the most-wanted list.
All contacts are in LoTW - let me know privately if anything is missing so I can fix broken QSOs.
Thanks to everyone for chasing me, and massive thanks for the several donations, and apologies to those who didn’t quite make it into the log.
See you on the next grid trip!
Barry K7BWH
ba...@k7bwh.com
Shari Wright
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