An AA5B Adventure: Activating Ebright Azimuth, the Top of Delaware

By some measures, this was quite an expedition. From the time I left Albuquerque until I returned five days later, I’d traveled about four thousand miles by air and 750 miles by rental car, and spent enough money to buy a loaded K2.

I’ve been on several DX contest expeditions that were less complicated! But the truth is that this trip’s real purpose was to help my youngest daughter, Catie / KC5KED, move back to college for her sophomore year at Princeton. Ham radio was a small part of the adventure.

Delaware’s high point, in the extreme northern tip of the state just a mile or two south of the Pennsylvania state line, is not much to write home about. The second smallest state also has the second lowest summit, a mere 448 feet above sea level. It’s easily accessed by car, unheralded by any markers or monuments, has no great views of the surrounding terrain, and doesn’t present itself as anything geographically special… just a slight mound with an old forest tower sitting in a five-acre meadow in front of a mobile home park. Before moving to New Mexico in ’78, I’d lived about 10 miles from Delaware’s Ebright Azimuth for 20 years without ever knowing it existed! In fact, just about everyone in Delaware when I was growing up thought that Mt. Cuba was the highest point, but the USGS now says otherwise. (Here’s a bit of radio trivia: Mike, WA3HGV, won the ARRL DX Phone Contest from his very modest home station on Mt. Cuba in the early 1970s.)

The Adventure Radio Society’s web site showed that no one had yet activated Delaware’s high point in the Top of the World activity, so I alerted my friend, Bob / K2UT, that we should try to do it during my trip. We set aside Saturday morning, Sept. 7, as a good time to try, assuming I was done helping Catie move her stuff by then.

With the tighter airline security restrictions since September 2001, I didn’t want to travel with a radio, batteries, paddles, and antenna, but I’m not sure I would’ve had room anyway. Catie and I had eight big, heavy bags loaded with her school and dorm supplies, and 7.2 of them were hers. No room for QRP gear there! Luckily, Bob had all the necessary equipment at his house.

K2UT drove from his home in Medford, NJ on Saturday morning and met me at 10 o’clock in front of Ham Radio Outlet in New Castle, DE, just a three-minute walk from my mother’s house. I climbed into the back seat with his four-year-old son, Jason (what a great kid!), and we headed north up I-95. Twenty minutes later we were at Ebright Azimuth and ready to set up the station. This was a LOT easier than my trip to Wheeler Peak in New Mexico.

The grassy field at Ebright had only one tree, about 20 feet tall, and we hadn’t brought any antenna support poles, so the choice of operating site was easy. We carried the FT-847, solar-charged battery, and plastic storage bin with all the other goodies a whopping 150 feet from the road to the tree and began setting up. Bob had the electronics ready to go in less than five minutes, but it took me another two or three to finish the antenna – a quarter-wave vertical with two radials elevated about four feet.

My experience in the field over the years has shown this kind of antenna to be significantly worse than a dipole at modest heights, but sometimes you just have to make do. If there had been a higher tree, or a couple of other supports somewhere in the field, we might have cut off one of the radials and put up the antenna as a dipole or inverted V.

We had put together the antenna a few nights before, but (as usual) failed to check it out. What could go wrong… it’s just 234/f, cut three wires, do a little soldering. Well, on Saturday morning the radio kept flashing “Hi SWR” warning messages and the wattmeter showed just about zero forward power. Luckily, Bob had brought an old MFJ tuner that was good enough for getting the SWR seen by the rig down a bit and the forward power up in the tens of watts. Time for a QSO!

I made a half dozen long CQs on 14.06 MHz, but got no answers. I tuned down the band a little and heard NG9Q calling CQ loudly, so I answered him and gave a big thumb’s up to Bob when “AA5B/3 de NG9Q” came back through the headphones at 1439Z. I had a nice long QSO with Chuck in Illinois, then tried another eight fruitless CQs on the QRP frequency. QRPers might be the most active builders in the hobby, but maybe more of them should actually operate more often.

Bob was getting nervous about operating on what looked like private property, so I took Jason for a little walk to look for additions to his rock collection while Bob tried to make a quick QSO on SSB. A very loud K4TWJ came back with “K2UT, you’re very weak.” Obviously, the antenna wasn’t very good.

Mission accomplished, we packed up the station in less than five minutes and headed south on I-95 to visit my mom. We’d conquered the top of Delaware!
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Information on ARS’s Top of the World activity can be found at http://www.natworld.com/ars/pages/top_of_the_world/tow_descrip.html
Photo, from left to right: Bruce/AA5B, Jason, Bob/K2UT

Bruce can be reached at BruceAA5B@aol.com
Bob’s address is bob@applegate.org
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Bruce Draper, AA5B, an avid outdoorsman and QRPer, lives in Albuquerque, NM. Bob Applegate, K2UT, lives in Medford, NJ.