[Alexandria Radio Club Reflector] Field trip report - Kaua'i

[Kenneth R. van Wyk]

Quick field trip report from Poipu Beach, Kaua’i, Hawai’i.

My goals for this year’s trip were modest, as we’re on vacation after all. I wanted to make good use of the repeater networks here, which I did. I also wanted to use VARA FM to send my Winlink Wednesday check-ins on both Wednesdays we’ve been gone. I succeeded at that, but it did take a few tries.

The local VARA FM RMS gateway (WH6FG) is right up in Kalaheo near two 2 meter FM repeaters. I can quite reliably hit those repeaters, so I figured getting to the RMS would be easy as well. It was not.

(See map: We are in Poipu and the RMS in Kalaheo. What the map doesn’t well represent is terrain. We’re about 50 feet above the ocean, and Kalaheo is at a couple hundred feet up. One repeater is at KARC Elmer Jim Pilgram’s QTH and one is even higher, up on Kukui`olono — I’d guess it to be 300-400 feet up, and we can see Kukui`olono from our sunset spot.)

The other piece of terrain you can’t see here is the little ridge between our condo and Poipu beach. It’s a 10 minute walk, but you go up to the top of the ridge and back down into Poipu Beach itself. I’m pretty sure that is the line of sight impediment that kept my HT from reliably getting to the RMS. Next year, I’ll bring my “survival antenna” I used in TN recently. Perhaps it will fare better than my duckie.

When I couldn’t get to the RMS from our lanai, I drove to 2 alternate QTHs. One was at the golf course at the top of Kukui`olono, and that one succeeded spectacularly. The second was from a picnic bench on Poipu Beach. It too succeeded just fine, and that’s where I sent my week 1 wednesday check-in from.

Now, when I tested from the golf course, I had to fiddle with the speaker/mic volume settings a bit to get it to work. With as clear a signal as you can get, I ended up running both speaker and mic at about 25% volume (via Windows volume settings). That worked great.

When I tested from Poipu Beach Park, those same settings were happy, but it did take 2 connection attempts to get in.

In both locations, I got really good throughput, similar to a 56 kb modem.

I’m happy with how things worked. I’ll add a few things to my to-do list next year, but this year’s field operation, such as it is, went quite well. The island does have a few HF RMS gateways, so I’ll give that some thought…

Background: I’m a member of KARC and have been using their repeaters for a few years now. We’re here for 2 weeks every year. They run 2 parallel networks of linked repeaters. KH6E is linked by RF and KH6S is linked by Internet (AllStarNet). (I often monitor KH6S from Alexandria using the Transceive application on my Mac.) Our condo here is right on the ocean at the southernmost point of the island. (See attached sunrise from this morning.)

Cheers,

Ken van Wyk


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