My lovely wife and I recently returned from a 2,100 mile road trip that took us from Atlanta, GA, to Mammoth Cave, KY, to Benton Harbor, MI, to Oregon, OH to Cincinnati, OH and then home again. The objective was Benton Harbor, to attend her nephew's wedding, but the other stops were for pleasure. For example, we both grew up in Maumee, OH, and wanted to visit relatives and old haunts, so we booked a campsite at Maumee Bay State Park in Oregon, OH (a great park, BTW).
We were moving fast - a day or two here and there - and the objective was to visit people and see interesting things. In that sense we weren't really 'camping', we were just hauling our hotel room around behind our F-350. What also worked against us was the heat. Just as we left Atlanta, a near record setting heat dome settled in over much of the eastern US. Here's the temperature in Benton Harbor, on the shores of Lake Michigan, on June 21st at 2:00 pm:
I took along a compact radio setup knowing operating opportunities would be few and far between. I was right on that part. The only chance I got to set up was at our campground in Benton Harbor. This was a KOA, nicely run and well maintained, but campers were stuffed in cheek-by-jowl. This is a 'feature' of every KOA and private campground we've ever stayed at. The owners want to maximize profit, so spaces are tight. Stuff as many in as you can. This arrangement also highlights another problem with camping - RFI from the power inverters, converters and solar charge controllers built into every camper made in the last 20 years. It's a literal RF soup in these campgrounds, and many bands are simply unusable. Your only real defense is to use a radio that has strong filtering, and maybe bring along a set of bandpass filters.
I was using my Elecraft KX3, and much of the 40 meter band was unusable due to RFI (and the KX3 has strong bandpass filters built in), but I did find segments of 20 meters that were usable. Alas, my antenna setup wasn't good enough. I tried two vertical antennas - the desktop Elecraft AX1 you see in the photo, and a larger Chameleon 17' vertical. Alas, I wasn't able to make any Winlink or JS8 connections. I don't blame the campground RFI for this - it was really an antenna issue.
Which brings me to a major point of this post. I'm a big supporter of the 'AM radio in every car' initiative. Both because I do feel AM radio is important, but also because having to incorporate a working AM receiver into vehicles means car manufacturers will have to take the time to 'clean up' their electrical systems designs to minimize RF noise. This goes double for electric vehicles. Then hopefully there will be a trickle-down effect, where the FCC gets off its ass and does its job and starts forcing manufacturers of things like inverters, switch mode power supplies, solar charge controllers, etc. to clean up their products. Then maybe ham radio operators will be able to set up next to their campers and only have to deal with a light sprinkle of RF noise instead of the flood we deal with now.
W8BYH out
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