A couple of friends and their sons joined my youngest and I for a quick overnight camp out to William O’Brien State Park.

Located just 45 minutes or so north east of St. Paul, MN, it lies just east of the St. Croix river which boundaries Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Our group campsite was a short walk from the parking area. Thankfully, they have carts available as this was car camping and we didn’t go lightweight.

My son and arrived earlier than the rest, so after taking some time to setup camp I immediately got to work getting the station setup.

The group sites here have lots of tables and multiple fire pits to host quite a few people. Overkill for the 7 of us but nice to have some space to ourselves.

For this outing I brought the MTR-4b v2. On the eve of the initial release of the brand new MTR-3b from LNR Precision on October 1st, it seemed appropriate to activate with this little workhorse.

Coupled with the JPC-12 vertical, I was up and running in just a few minutes. Being outside the cities and without infrastructure nearby, signals were clear and many.

Fortunately, after getting spotted on http://pota.app, the hunters didn’t take long to materialize and within about 20 minutes I had logged 12 contacts and then shut things down to focus on the important part of the trip – my son.

All in all it was an evening of good friends, food over a campfire, and sleeping to the serenade of coyotes under a blanket of stars.

KH1 In the House

I got home earlier today to find something unexpected – my KH1 had arrived! Ordered on September 15th, and shipped the 23rd, this was well below the expected 15-21 business days noted on Elecraft’s shipping status page.

I haven’t had much chance to do anything except opening the shipping box and taking stock of things, but will certainly circle back with my thoughts and experiences shortly.