Florida 2022

In 2019, my wife and I enjoyed a mid-winter break by flying from our cold Philadelphia area home to warm Marco Island Florida. When we made our reservations in May 2021, we thought a return to Marco in January would occur well after acute Covid dangers had passed. We were wrong. The biggest Covid surge yet was raging when the time came to fly to our rental condo, but with thousands already spent, we reluctantly continued to press on with our plans.

Everyone enjoys a warm climate break away from cold, ice, and snow. But while my wife is in her favorite environment lounging on a beach all day, I am one of those oddballs who dislikes every part of the beach experience. My idea of a fun trip is to operate ham radio from parks as an “activator” in the popular and growing Parks On The Air program (“POTA”, parksontheair.com). Just a couple of weeks before leaving for Florida, I decided to bring a ham station with me on an air travel trip for the first time.

I already had a station that can be setup quickly and operated self-contained from a small car. My Hustler mobile antenna system consists of a 54-inch rigid mast and three band “resonators” (enclosed coils) with tunable whips. This is a center-loaded antenna that is more efficient than the typical base-loaded mobile or portable antenna. When parked at my operating location, I place a triple-magnet mount on the roof of my sedan and install the Hustler system on the mount with a twist of a quick-release mechanism. My radio is an Icom IC-7100, with a separate control head allowing me more choices than a typical radio in placing the antenna coax and power cables independent of my operating position. An LDG IT-100 automatic transmatch (“tuner”) integrates well with the Icom, and with a push of a button on the Icom control head, the transmatch allows me to operate on frequencies away from the natural bandwidth of the resonators. While I had a good car-portable station, several components needed to be swapped to be airplane worthy.

My Hustler mast was a single solid unit which was too long to fit into a standard large suitcase. It might have been possible to bring that 54” mast in a fishing rod case or other specialized carrier, but I didn’t want the hassle and likely extra fee. Hustler makes fold-over masts too, so I bought the one with a center hinge. Until I got the new mast home, I did not understand that it would only fold over at most about 110°, even after removing a horizontal support. That wide “V” shape would not fit in my large suitcase. The mechanism for holding the two halves straight together during operation was just a friction collar. With only a hope that the mast would still work afterward, I cut the hinge into two separate halves. I was happy with the result—I could assemble the mast halves together as strongly as before my cut. If I had more time, I might have tried to find a screw-together mast solution, but I only had time for this literal hack.

With a smaller battery than I am used to using, I was worried about having sufficient battery energy for my typical all-day multi-park POTA roves. To mitigate that worry, I wanted to be able to partly top-off the battery charge when driving a significant distance between park activations. The lithium battery charger I used for years supplies less than one ampere; this was fine for my old battery, which I would recharge overnight at the end of an operation day. To top off between activations while driving, I wanted a charger to be closer to the 6-ampere maximum charge current spec for my new 12Ah battery. I happened to already have a “smart” NOCO battery charger I used for AGM batteries, which also had a selectable lithium mode that supported LiFePO4 batteries. Its max charge current was 5 amps, so that was a good choice for fast charging of my new battery. To feed the charger, I’d also need an inverter to take the car’s 12vdc accessory supply and produce 120vac for the charger. I found a cheap Harbor Freight “120w” inverter with a convenient cigarette lighter plug input, which had USB sockets in addition to the AC socket so I could keep my phone charged while charging the lithium battery. In theory, this charging system would give me confidence to operate all day driving around to as many parks as possible. In practice, I forgot something vital; more on that later.

All the station components that were packed into the Apache case

I was indecisive for a while about checking the equipment case versus carrying it on the plane. I finally decided to check it because even at thirty pounds it would be inconvenient to deal with along with my “personal item” containing the battery, laptop, and other items. On American Airlines, this third bag cost $40 each way. Our flight on Saturday Jan. 8 was nearly cancelled after we sat in the plane for two hours, de-planed, waited an hour, and had a plane change that required us to schlep to another terminal. Then our pilots timed-out and a long search for replacements followed. Our scheduled 1:30pm flight was airborne a little before 9pm, yet we were grateful the flight was not cancelled. With all that walking around in the airport, I was glad I decided to check the station equipment case.

Arriving exhausted at our car rental desk only a half-hour before it closed, we signed for the small SUV I had reserved, thinking it would be spacious and comfortable for my station and all-day park trips. We made the hour-long drive down to our Marco Island condo building, to be greeted by prominent signs warning the residents that due to a repair, we would have no running water in the morning. A “perfect” end to a difficult travel day.

Losing Saturday and part of Sunday meant I couldn't start unpacking, assembling, and testing the station till late Sunday afternoon. I did a connectivity test by precariously mounting the antenna on a shallow balcony cap. Everything seemed to work together, but I didn’t spend much time testing because I neither wanted to drop the antenna off the balcony, nor to embarrass my wife on the beach. After verifying basic completeness and connectivity, I put the station components in a shopping cart and wheeled it down to the rental SUV to install the station. The complete ~7-foot antenna was able to be carried in one piece after I figured out how to lower one of the back seats to make room for the mast.

To completely verify and tune the system, I could have gone to any open area, but decided to drive a half-hour to the nearest POTA site, Collier-Seminole State Park, so I could make some POTA contacts as the final step of the station verification. I arrived near sunset, but the friendly ranger at the gatehouse let me in anyway and didn’t charge me an entrance fee with so little sunlight left. I parked near a lake for openness, got out the magnet mount to place it on the center of the SUV roof and … no magnetic attraction. Shining a light on the roof in the semi-darkness, I realized every square inch of the roof was covered with plastic covers and parts, apparently supporting a large sunroof. I did not notice this when I picked up the SUV bleary-eyed and exhausted the night before. Crestfallen, I packed up the station while being bitten enthusiastically by twilight mosquitos.

Back at the condo, I tried to find out how to get a different vehicle. With Covid staffing issues, it was impossible to get through to the airport car rental location to verify they had a vehicle with a plain metal roof I could swap into. I admit though that a requirement for a ferromagnetic roof is not a typical request from a customer. After almost an hour total on hold, including failed attempts by the central customer service center to contact the airport rental desk, I gave up trying on the phone and web to take a chance to drive the full hour to the airport after clearing out my station equipment. Luckily, the rental desk was not busy, as it had been the night before. I talked to a friendly and helpful Budget representative, and she directed me toward a sedan that she didn’t think had a sunroof. I took my magnetic mount to the candidate car to be sure it stuck to the roof, and gratefully swapped my Ford Explorer for a VW Jetta. I didn’t like the Explorer anyway, so I considered the Jetta an upgrade even though it was older and smaller. After the hour drive back to the condo, my energy was drained, so I planned to return to Collier-Seminole the next morning to do the same verification work I had hoped to do earlier that evening.

I had left the shopping cart with my ham station components in the condo’s main room, so first thing Monday morning I wheeled the cart to the Jetta to arrange my equipment again. The smaller car did not support keeping the antenna mast together. I transported the antenna with the resonators attached to the top half of the mast with the bottom half of the mast separate, the parts to be assembled at each operation location. Arriving back at Collier-Seminole I stopped at the gate to buy a statewide park pass, which might not have been a good value for me during this trip but it would show my appreciation for Florida’s extensive park system. At the same lakeside parking spot as the night before, I assembled the antenna on the magnetic mount, and measured a reasonable resonance point in the voice portion of the three bands supported by the three resonators. While I could have adjusted the whips to get resonance closer to the middle of my typical operation frequencies, that process involves tuning iterations I didn’t want to spend time on, so I declared the tuning “good enough” in combination with my transmatch.

Operating in Mid-Atlantic parks, I was used to making most of my daytime contacts on 40m; down in Florida I naturally started on 40, but after struggling to make two contacts, I switched to 20m to make 31 QSOs. When I later posted this experience on the Facebook group, prolific Mid-Atlantic POTA activator Kerri KB3WAV remarked that she had the same experience, so I stuck with 20m during my time in Florida with reliable results.

A few weeks before my trip when I had announced my Florida travel plans on the POTA Facebook page, John Martin KN4SWS contacted me to arrange to meet. Collier-Seminole was the closest park to both John and me, and he has activated that park over 100 times (with 7000+ contacts). He often does his activations early, so John was finishing his activation as I arrived. We met as I was preparing to get on the air, and after talking a bit, I made my first two Florida contacts to his HT a few feet away. While I was making my HF POTA contacts, John was drawing a map of POTA sites within reasonable driving distance.

When I finished my activation session at Collier-Seminole, John and I discussed my rove plan for the rest of the day. He had mapped out the same parks I was planning to visit that day, with one additional site I did not know was reachable. His map showed specific places to operate in those parks that in some cases were better than I had picked out without his local knowledge. John generously offered to help me during my Florida visit, and I took him up on his offer that evening when I had a battery problem. We said goodbyes, and I packed up for the five other parks on my rove plan.

The next three parks on my plan were along the famous Tamiami Trail (U.S. Route 41 through the Everglades). I took advantage of KN4SWS’s suggestions to operate in park lots just off the road at the first three sites, where I made around 20 contacts each. Those three were reasonably close together, so I wasn’t worried about my freshly charged battery enough to justify trying to charge it between stops. My next location was a bit farther away at the northernmost official visitor center of Everglades National Park, so I wanted to give my battery a quick charge while driving there.

At home, I had built adapters to allow me to easily connect and disconnect the battery from my radio, and to connect the battery to the charger I would use in the car. Anderson Powerpole connectors were the obvious choice for having good electrical and mechanical connections while being easy to connect and disconnect in the field. The battery had F2 Faston tab terminals common for batteries of that size; I found that standard blue (14-16 AWG) female quick disconnect crimp terminals worked well. My NOCO battery charger uses a proprietary battery connector with standard adapters available, one of which is an SAE Quick Disconnect that I bought. I already had SAE to Powerpole adapters from another project available, so I should be good to go for battery charging: Battery terminals to blue tab connectors to a short pair of wires to a Powerpole pair, mated to one my existing Powerpole to SAE adapters, mated to my new SAE to NOCO adapter. Everything in that chain of adapters connected successfully. But I did not try charging the battery with that system, I only charged the battery at home with my original NOCO spring clamps. This is a violation of rule #1 of portable ham operations: test everything together just before you pack the kit. I know this rule, I have advised many new POTA operators of this rule, I generally live by this rule. But not this time.

Before I left for the Everglades visitors center, with the car running I connected the DC-to-AC inverter to the car cigarette lighter, the NOCO charger to the AC output of the inverter, and lastly the chain of adapters from the charger ending in a Powerpole pair to the Powerpole pair on the battery adapter. Instead of the reassuring blue light indicating a lithium battery charging operation, the charger had one of its several red symbol lights on that I hadn’t seen lit before. It took me a few moments to realize that the plus and minus signs with a circular arrow around them meant reversed polarity. Taking apart my chain of adapters I realized that my SAE to Powerpole adapter connected the red positive Powerpole to the female half of the SAE connector. This was correct if the SAE connector was coming from a battery, but wrong if the SAE connector was coming from a battery charger—the recessed female side was meant to protect against shorting a vehicle battery positive terminal against vehicle chassis ground. I was livid with myself, because if I had either compared the SAE connector to my old charger, or verified charging at home, I would have caught and easily fixed this problem before packing for Florida.

To charge the battery with the equipment I brought to Florida, I had to change the polarity of one of the adapters in the chain of connections needed for charging. Although I could have easily swapped the Faston connectors on the battery terminals just during charging, I thought that was dangerous because during a long fatiguing park rove I could forget to swap them back before connecting my radio, with a possibility of radio or battery damage due to wrong polarity. Instead, I decided to do a proper fix by swapping the short wires on the SAE-to-Powerpole adapter. At home, this would have taken five minutes because I already had the cutter, wire stripper, splice terminals, and terminal crimper. Although I didn’t bring any of that with me to Florida, I was pretty sure I could find a cheap crimp tool and crimp terminal set at a Harbor Freight Tools store. I found one in Naples 45 minutes away; when I got there I was grateful to find not only a crimper/stripper/cutter combo, but the tool was packaged with a small set of crimp terminals including the butt splices I needed. After a 30-minute drive to the rental condo, I was quite tired but ready to reverse the polarity of my adapter and charge my empty battery.

The wires between the SAE connector and Powerpoles were short, so I was happy my butt splice installation on the swapped wires was successful the first time. Connecting the battery to the charger, and the charger to AC, I expected a blinking blue charging indicator light. Instead, I got … nothing. Did I discharge the battery so badly it was damaged? Was the charger defective? I had used other lithium batteries on portable ham operations for more than five years, and never had this happen before. I first suspected I got a dud battery. As I dug into the Web, I relearned some lithium battery basics I had forgotten: Even though the battery continued delivering current right to the end of my previous activation, apparently the battery management system (“BMS”) was now protecting the lithium cells by cutting off terminal voltage. It would not turn on again until it got enough of a charge. But my “smart” charger was so smart it refused to charge because it couldn’t see any voltage from the battery. What I thought I needed was a “dumb” charger specifically for 12v (nominal) LiFePO4 batteries that would deliver the initial 14.4 charging volts even though the charger didn’t see any voltage from the battery.

Amazon offered plenty of simple lithium chargers that should have worked. None of them could be delivered any earlier than Thursday, leaving only one day of ham operations before we returned to Philly on Saturday. Frustratingly, I could have gotten one delivered to my home the next day Tuesday, but not to this area of Florida. Next, I called my new Florida ham buddy John KN4SWS, asking if he had a lithium charger I could borrow or if I could leave my battery overnight at his house to get charged. While he had a charger and was willing to let me use it, his charger had a barrel connector for Bioenno batteries. I jokingly said I could make that work by cutting off the barrel connector and crimping on Faston connectors using my new crimp tool set. John then suggested a battery specialty store in Naples that could have a simple lithium charger. I planned to drive to the store at their opening time the next day.

On Tuesday morning, we drove the 40 minutes to the Naples battery store. While the storekeeper was trying to be helpful, his lithium selection was surprisingly limited, and he had no simple lithium charger in stock. He suggested a simple charger that looked like it was meant for SLA batteries, but I was desperate and bought the charger with assurances I could return it. Our 50-minute drive back to the condo was followed by an unsurprising disappointment that this new charger did not work with my battery. I am embarrassed to admit that it was only after this failure that I started looking for a solution using the charger I brought from home. The single-sheet glossy user guide from NOCO only described typical usage for batteries that were not severely discharged. Deeper sleuthing uncovered a more detailed manual that documented a “force mode” that could be tried if the battery voltage was too low to be detected. With the NOCO charger now connected to my battery, I mashed the battery-type button for more than the 5 seconds required to enter “force mode”. The four red error condition lights were continuously lit in sequence, which I assumed meant there was a problem. Still, it was some sign of life, so I left it alone to do other things in the condo. Every few minutes, I checked but saw no change in the light display. After around 20 minutes, I came back to see that the normal blue lithium charging indicator was blinking. I was surprised and happy, and let the charger continue to work until I got to a 90% done indication. While this was only a bulk charge, and I really should have left it alone to be sure the BMS was done with cell balancing, I was excited to get back out on the road to activate more parks on my list.

After just a few minutes on my drive back, I suddenly felt joint and body aches. The pains became progressively worse on my drive back to the condo, and by the time I reached Marco, I began shaking with chills and had difficulty climbing the few stairs to the building lobby. After getting into bed, my wife found two blankets we didn’t use before, and even after I was cocooned in them, my legs continued to shake violently. In my 64 years, I don’t remember ever getting substantial fever symptoms and aches so quickly. When the rigors died down in a couple hours, I asked Facebook friends for advice because with Covid raging everywhere, seeking medical help as I would in normal times seemed like a last resort. I was grateful to get several suggestions and expressions of concern, but answers from patient care nurses said they were seeing symptoms like mine in their Omicron patients. That led me to be overly concerned, not because I thought I was in grave danger (having been vaccinated and boosted), but because it was easy to imagine having to miss my flight home in four days either because of symptoms or because of travel rules. It didn’t help that home test kits were unobtainable then. I did my best to quarantine from my wife, and we both wore good masks whenever we had to be in the same room within the small condo.

After Tuesday's night continued flu-like symptoms, on Wednesday morning I didn’t feel great, but felt far better than I had. By the afternoon I was mostly better, and thought I had a miraculous recovery in such a short time. With my other symptoms no longer distracting me, I finally noticed a red, warm, raised area on the back of my left calf that was painful to the touch; it looked and felt much like a severe sunburn. I also noticed what might have been two puncture marks near the center of the red area. Based on that, and the sudden rise and fall of my symptoms, I guessed that I didn’t have a transmissible disease, but rather I experienced a reaction from venom. The timing of the onset of symptoms, right after I was walking around wearing shorts in uncut grass in near darkness, would be consistent with a moderately venomous bite, perhaps from a spider because I would think I would have felt a snake bite and it would have left a more obvious mark. (I saw my regular doctor after I returned home, and he thought this was a good guess too.) This was all conjecture from someone with no medical or first aid training whatsoever, but I functioned as if it were true.

Back again at the Big Cyprus & Florida Trail parking area, this time with a working battery

Friday was our last day before our Saturday travel day back home, so I planned an aggressive early-start rove of up to six POTA sites. The first site was 1.5 hours north, and I would make my way southward toward Marco, activating parks only a few miles from I-75. Except for the last site of the six, these were conservation and wildlife areas with primitive parking. Azores again and multiple Finland stations were DX highlights, along with a good mix of distances around the country. 133 contacts on Friday was consistent with the rest of the week typically getting a little over twenty contacts per park. With my rove completed ahead of schedule, I was able to spend time at the last site, Koreshan State Park. I learned about the Koreshan Unity, a religious sect whose former community compound was donated to the state to create this State Park after the last Koreshan died. They had unusual world views, and I was fascinated to learn about them.