W1AW/1 on a POTA activation"

Activating
1

Hams in my area are being offered a chance to operate W1AW/1 in Massachusetts to commemorate the League’s 100th and the country’s 250th. They’re offering times during February and August.

I think it’d be really fun to operate W1AW/1 on a POTA activation, but would it cause havoc for the hunters?

2

I’m having a low IQ day, here, so please explain why this would cause havoc? And would it be bad havoc, or good havoc?

3

I was just thinking about logging on POTA.app. There are going to be a bunch of W1AW/1 operators this year, probably more than one doing POTA, and I was trying to figure out if I’d need to add W1AW/1 as a call on my personal W1GRD account.

I got great advice from Beau WC9B and Jim KB2FMH, the situation is that W1AW/1 is registered on POTA.app as a club call, so I’ll send regular logs to the ARRL coordinator and the POTA logs to Jim and he handles it on the POTA side.

I’m not a huge ARRL supporter (dating back to my role at 73 of thorn-in-side) and didn’t particularly want W1AW on my own POTA page. I do think that doing a W1AW/1 activation would be fun for both me and the hunters, so I requested some time. I did the same thing at W1AW HQ, stopped in and hunted a bunch of POTA from W1AW.

That reminds me of a story… Here I am hunting from W1AW and I hear a CQ POTA from Maryland. I swing the 6-el beam around and reply with a touch over 600W.

What I hear is NS1C TU 5NN MD BK. en NS1C is a good friend and I knew he was sitting on his patio running about 20 into. wire tossed over a bush. Beat me out fair and square. I got MD on the second call.

4

I am unsurprised by your story. Here’s my guess what happened…

  1. activator calls CQ POTA
  2. both you and NS1C respond, and at least one of you has the sense to not zero-beat the activator.
  3. Activator can hear NS1C at about 539 and can year you at 599+45db.
  4. Activator calls NS1C first, following the W7PFB heuristic, which is “Always work the weakest station you can copy FIRST”, because even a modest fade might mean you can no longer hear them, and it would take an utter blackout to bury your S9+30 signal.

I’m pretty confident that I’m far from the only activator who follows this heuristic.

1 Like
5

You know, I am much more selfish as an activator, I use a greedy algorithm.

6

But…

If you work the weak ones first, and then work the strong signals, you get both. If you work the strong ones first, you lose the chance to work some of the weak ones, because the opportunity QSBs away. Or that’s my theory, anyway.

But maybe the strong signals are stations run by hunters who are impatient, and if you don’t get them right away, they take the 1.5kW and beam on a tower, and go hunt someone else, because they’re addicted to instant gratification.

Maybe it’s a wash and I’m just rationalizing my preference for working the guy hunting park to park trying to eke out the last two he needs to make ten, over the guy sitting in a warm dry shack running 1.5kW into a yagi. We all have our prejudices, I guess. And honestly, sitting here in the PNW running QRP it’s not as if I get massive Witherspoon style pileups to sort thru, I get get single callers in drips and drops.