We have a static caravan in North Yorkshire, which is about a hour from the QTH. Less than 10 minutes car drive from there I can be sitting on top of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park which is POTA G-0003.

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It’s not often I get the opportunity to disappear for a hour or so and set up a /P station but today was one of rare those days Accompanied by my eldest daughter who was keen to be on logbook duty we drove to IO94ML and chose a spot next to a solid road sign (262 metres above sea level).

The equipment I’d packed in the hope of getting on the air was:

This was my first proper usage of everything apart from my IC-705. It was also my first operation in my ’new’ car - an VW ID4 (EV) - what could go wrong?

The mast was strapped to the road sign with the end fed antenna without any issue. All the various cables I’d packed were just what I needed.

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I connected the PA500 and after a quick on-the-fly refresher of how to turn it on I tuned to 10m and supplied some drive, it found a match quickly and then all the lights on the unit went off. A quick check showed that the fuse in the ‘cigarette lighter’ power cable had blown. The PA500 must have drawn more than I’d anticipated.

All the spare fuses I had are the newer style ‘spade’ fuses so I was stuck with my partially charged IC-705 battery and a non-resonant antenna. Fortunately 10m was showing an SWR of 1:1.3 so with my 5w I gave a few calls to stations without too much luck.

I managed a single contact with OE6GBG (Gerald) who was a great 59 signal with me. My 5w did well to receive a 55 after covering the 1444km (897 miles) between us.

All in all not that successful but it was great to get at least one contact.

As always, there are plenty of lessons to be learnt. First off, I’ll check the draw of the PA500 [update: At TX its 8A] and see if that suitable to be hooked up to my car. Having that working would have given me both a bit more power (up to 40w at 12v) as well as access to all the bands below 28MHz (to 7MHz), which of course seemed much busier than 10m.

The mast performed well, it wasn’t windy. I’ve ordered a Drive-on car stand which should give me a bit more freedom for setup.

Hopefully next time I’ll be able to devote some more time and things will be a bit more finely tuned. It might be worth reactivating my stored LifePo4 battery as well.

I’d love to do a /P operation for the QO-100 satellite from North Yorkshire in the future as well.