Hotel Winlink Test

Hotel Winlink Test

This week I had to travel to Austin, TX for work. Not wanting to waste the opportunity to experiment with different configurations, I decided to bring along my Icom IC-705 radio with two goals in mind – get in a POTA activation before heading back to the airport on Friday and do some experimentation to see what kind of results I could get operating HF from inside my hotel room.

This morning before work, I set about meeting the “operating HF from inside my hotel room” objective. I set up a magnetic loop antenna, connected the IC-705 to my Microsoft Surface Pro X computer, and fired up Winlink Express. Being very early morning, I decided to use 80m and found an RMS station on the map that appeared to be reasonable given time of day and frequency. After picking my station, I did the usual fiddling around with the antenna tuning required for mag loops, and blasted away with my whopping 5 watts (running on battery). The result? Success!

Later in the day I learned that my Friday work schedule had to change and there would no longer be time to do a POTA activation before going back to the airport. Good thing for me that I already activated the park on a previous work trip to Austin.

At another time, I’ll write more on the software and equipment referenced in this post.