A Grid Square Expedition to Gooseneck State Park, UT

The Prescott area has a fairly large group of hams that are active on 6 Meter SSB and CW, including W7JLC, WN7L, N6KZ, W7RCS, AD7TG, WD8DOT, K6CWB, N6SS and me, among others.   You might ask, why do all these folks operate on 6?  On 6 Meters, many hams collect grid squares, rather than states or countries.  This is because on VHF, propagation is often limited to “line of sight” modes and communicating with other states or countries is pretty difficult.   A grid square is a rectangle defined by each degree of latitude and 2 degrees of longitude.  The entire planet is divided into these grids and they are specified by combinations of letters and numbers.  Our local grid square is DM34.  You can find much more detail, including how to locate your grid square (if you are outside of Prescott) at http://www.arrl.org/grid-squares. 

The basic award for collecting grid squares is called VUCC (VHF/UHF Century Club) and is modeled after the DX Century Club award.  On 6 Meters, you must collect QSLs from 100 grid squares to qualify for the basic award.  There are endorsements for collecting more grid QSLs and the number of grid QSLs you must collect gets smaller at higher frequencies.  If you have VHF or UHF QSLs you would like checked, see N6KZ - he can check them for you and save you the postage to the ARRL.

As you might expect, with the advent of most of the newer radios including 6 Meters, grid square collecting has become very popular.  And, of course, some grids are easy to work (due to high populations) and others are more difficult.  With so many local hams on 6 Meters, DM34 is not very rare!  However, we live close to other grids that are very hard to work.  These include DM56 and DM57, which cover the area around 4 Corners. 

I decided to activate at least DM57 and possible DM56, if I had time.  I invited Fred, N7PJN, to come along and maybe learn something about 6 Meter operating.  In DM57, I wanted to find a place off the Indian reservations, where we could camp easily and discovered Gooseneck State Park in southern UT.  Why is there a place called Gooseneck State Park? 

Here is why:

That is the San Juan River, meandering around.  Gooseneck State Park is at the end of the small black line. 

The views from the canyon edge are so panoramic they are difficult to capture, so here is a photo of the some rafter/campers along the river (look carefully):

Fred installed APRS in my car and we towed my small travel trailer, filled with all the requisite radio equipment.  We arrived in the afternoon of Friday, June 3 and set up the radios and a 3 element 6 Meter yagi on 25 feet of mast.  Of course, 6 Meters was dead.  Fred set up his Winlink station and verified it was working by downloading some email.  We were all set - all we needed was some sort of propagation.

We got up early on Saturday and of course, 6 Meters was still dead.  So we decided to try for some meteor scatter (M/S) contacts.  6 Meter M/S is actually pretty easy - in addition to a radio and antenna all you need is a sound card and some free software.  We fired up the radio and it promptly shut itself off!  In my excitement when we arrived, I had forgotten to switch the trailer refrigerator from battery power to propane.  So it had been keeping the beer cold all Friday afternoon and Saturday night on the 12 volt battery.  So we quickly hooked up the car battery (engine running) to the trailer battery with jumper cables and got back on the air - sort of.  In my excitement of troubleshooting the low battery voltage, I had turned down the radio output power from 100 watts to 10 watts and forgot to turn it back up.  Note the theme here - in my excitement, I forget stuff.  I actually made 6 contacts on M/S running 10 watts, which is a testament to the skill of the operators on the other end.  During the rest of the day, we re-charged the battery using Fred’s solar panel, while occasionally working some folks during brief 6 Meter band openings.  However, the trailer battery is a 220 AH battery and the solar panel supplied about 2.5 amps, so charging the battery would take 88 hours or so (of sunshine).  But it helped a bit…

I brought a small laptop computer to use for logging and for M/S contacts and during the morning, the battery had run down, so we plugged in the car charger and went for a hike - the state park is a beautiful area.  When we returned, we discovered that the car charger had failed and the computer was not fully charged.   So I decided to log our remaining contacts by hand (paper and pencil - who could imagine such a thing?) and save the computer battery for M/S contacts on Sunday morning.

We got up Sunday and made a few more M/S contacts, since the band was not open for SSB contacts.  I quit when the computer told me I had 2 hours of battery remaining.  We quickly packed up and drove south into AZ and grid DM56.  We set up on the side of a dirt road on the reservation and quickly discovered 2 problems.  There was huge power line noise, which made any kind of contacts extremely difficult and we had apparently chosen a very busy reservation road - cars full of Indians drove by about every 5 minutes.  Fortunately, our friendly smiles and waves were always returned with smiles and waves.   We struggled to make M/S contacts through the line noise (no other propagation of course) until the computer died.  For the entire trip, I ended up with a total of 40 QSOs, including only 2 in DM56.

The drive home was hot and very slow, into a 30 mph headwind.  We had to stop for gas every 100 miles or so, but we made it.  Special thanks to Fred for putting up with my intense antenna set up instructions and providing good company through our series of mini-disasters!

Here is the QSL from those rare grid squares!