Radio Ramblings: Frontenac State Park, 2 September 2024

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I finally made it to a park I've been wanting to hit for a while: Frontenac State Park, south of Red Wing, MN.

Why this park? Aside from just some variety in my Parks on the Air diet, it's situated on a bluff above the Mississippi River. Fort Snelling is great, but it's mostly low-lands. You literally drive down a fairly steep hill to get down to the park from the highway.

And for radio, height is might.

This activation was also a chance to finally use some equipment I've wanted to really put to the test for a while: a QRPLabs QMX (low-band), and a Hermes Lite 2, two very different small, low-power radios.

The QMX is a radio I literally could have built myself—they're easier to get hold of as kits than already built. In my case, I bought it already built but used, but buying pre-built from QRPLabs has a six month waiting list! It's about the size of a deck of cards. Meanwhile, I bought the kit for its big brother, the QMX+, and that'll be the subject of at least one more video, and an article, because I'm about 75% of the way through building it.

The QMX nominally puts out 5W, but for some reason (either a settings issue, or a blown transistor amongst the finals), I was only getting 1.5W tops out of it. I still made 20 contacts in about two hours. One reason for this is that it was just a really good day for propagation; another was undoubtedly the height! It's also, right now, a CW- and digital-only radio. Hans, the main engineer behind the platform, is still working on SSB firmware.

The Hermes Lite also puts out a nominal 5W, but was giving me better than that out of the gate, and I had the right cable to pair it with an also new-to-me amplifier.

Unlike the QMX, which pairs with a computer like many radios do, but has most of the smarts on the radio's own processor, the Hermes Lite is meant to be used as a peripheral to a computer, connected via Ethernet. Several software packages will drive the radio, but Thetis is the one most commonly paired with it, and Thetis is a complicated creature. All this to say, I spent a fair amount of time getting to know Thetis better, and not so much time making contacts with the Hermes Lite 2 despite the higher power I was able to get with it. That said, I did make a contact on a mode I haven't used before, JS8Call, a text-messaging protocol that layers on top of FT8. It's slow, and there are not a ton of people using it at any given time, but I was able to make a contact that way!

Finally, the whole experience was a chance to get more practice recording myself, editing video, and getting it out there for people to watch!

All in all, this was a great day!

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