QRPxpedition to the heart of an ancient volcano

My operating site near the summit of Great Blue Hill, south of Boston. The city's skyline is just visible on the horizon.

Somewhere between the easy chair and 14,000+ feet lie those “sweet spots” where amateur radio operators who are not mountain goats, but love the outdoors, can blend their interests in both. Add Great Blue Hill to your list of those sites.

I did, and by the end of the day July 25, the reservation would qualify as Parks on the Air (POTA) USMA005.

Great Blue Hill is the geographic anchor to the 7,000-acre Blue Hills State Reservation south of Boston. Seen from a Boston skyscraper, the hill stands tall on the southern horizon.

One can only imagine what it looked like 440 million years ago. More precisely, what its volcano looked like. Great Blue Hill and its six smaller, adjacent neighbors are the exposed portions of a vast magma chamber that once fed the volcano. The ancient mountain exploded, collapsed to form a caldera, the magma in the magma chamber crystalized, then slowly the caldera eroded to bare a bit of its long-cooled, hardened heart.

Home to the oldest continuously operating weather observatory in the US, today’s summit is a short, comfortable hike along one of several trails or up a paved road. Just below the summit, a large stone shelter and its 35-foot observation tower provided the destination for my outing to activate the reservation for Parks on the Air.

Eliot Tower, built during the Great Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Given the heat wave much of the country, including New England, had been experiencing over the preceding week, the weather was perfect for a day-long QRPxpedition. The temperature rose no higher than 73, with the clouds contributing to the cooler temperatures. And foot traffic was the order of the day, which made for great conversation, and a surprise, end-of-day  ”eyeball” QSO with a local ham I’d contacted earlier in the day.

Each one of these excursions represents a great opportunity to share a bit of ham radio with people who hiked up to visit the summit, as well as to enjoy one’s own enjoyable hike to the summit and back — physically active bookends to an electronically active day.

I arrived about 10 a.m. at the parking lot on Route 138, which skirts the western base of the hill. By 10:30, I was at the summit, stopping along the way to enjoy a cool day (for once!) and the amazing silence for a park in the heart of Boston’s metropolitan area. With the exception, of course, of the occasional airliner on final approach to Boston’s Logan International Airport.

By 11, I was set up and on the air, a bit sooner than I’d anticipated when posting my tentative activation schedule. The gear: My FT-817ND, a 7.2 Ah battery, a ZM-2 tuner, outboard keyer and paddles, and a straight key. For an antenna, I raised a 31-foot length of wire, which ran up my hideously orange Jackite pole, and set out two radials. The picnic table and some bungee cords (plus one large rock) did a nice job of holding the pole in place.

Right off the bat, I swapped howdies with a ham in Minnesota, followed by an exchange with a Summits on the Air (SOTA) station operating from Pac Monadnock in southern Hew Hampshire.

From then on, it was ham a little, talk a little…uh oh, here comes a riff from “The Music Man”:

Ham a little, talk a little,

Ham a little, talk a little,

Ham, ham, ham, talk a lot, ham a little more…

Visitors came and went singly, in pairs, and in three cases, as gaggles of childred or teens clearly out on day-camp excursions.

A family takes in the view from Eliot Tower.

The curious ranged from little children (“Mister, what’s that orange pole doing there”), to a Quincy, MA, firefighter (“People still use Morse code?!?”), to a young couple (whose guy-half asked: “Can you really understand all that beep, beep, beeping?”), to an attractive young-woman jogger who arrived during set-up (“Is that electronics in an Altoids tin?? My husband would *love* that!”).

Whooda thunk that electronics in an Altoids tin could be a chick magnet???

Among the day’s ham-radio haul:

NF0N — portable in Minnesota — 20 meters

WN1E — Summits on the Air — 20 meters

KA8WOG — Michigan — 20 meters

N4NSS — Florida (and the POTA’s logmeister) — 20 meters

NE1SJ — Pac Monadnock again, but a different call (the club call for the SOTA Jerks in western MA — I love that club name!) — 20 meters

W7CNL — Idaho — 20 meters

W1MA — Massachussets (Norwood, virtually under the shadow of Great Blue Hill) — 20 meters

W8PBO — West Virginia — 30 meters

KC2ZBZ — New York — 40 meters

KB1CL — Massachusetts (Braintree, also under the shadow of the Blue Hills) — 40 meters

N3JFD — Pennsylvania — 40 meters

VE3MGK — Ontario — 40 meters

Perhaps the two most memorable contacts involved the locals.

W1MA,  Ed, picked up my call using Morse code, and after conversing for a few minutes, we switched to voice (single-sideband on 20 meters). This was my first contact using SSB on my FT-817ND. I don’t tend to log end times for contacts, but between the CW and SSB portions, we must have gnawed the rag for at least a half hour, if not longer.

But the capstone to the day was the arrival of KB1CL, Wilbur (but he prefers Dusty), at my table as I was packing up. A very light rain had begun to fall, prompting me to close down operations a little earlier than I’d planned.

During our QSO, Dusty mentioned coming up to meet me. Unfortunately, he had been waiting at another picnic table near the weather observatory. I had mentioned I was at the summit, but apparently I was not. He allowed that after waiting a bit, he realized I probably was at the observation tower, not the observatory. My bad!

But he was in fine spirits and handed me a QSL card on the spot. Now, I ask you: How often does one get a QSL card hand-delivered anywhere, let alone on a hilltop, the day the QSO takes place?

What was that? I thought not.

“You’re not from here, are you?” he asked with a grin as he described his time hovering around the real summit’s lone picnic table.

He showed me the true summit (the summit monument is afixed to a stone outcrop inside the weather observatory’s fence), and we walked back downhill to the parking lot together, chatting about outings we have enjoyed. An avid birder, Dusty also was bemoaning the decline in meadowlarks in the area. Loss of habitat to development, he explained.

Interesting topics for a drizzly descent. Thanks for the hospitality, Dusty!