What use is an F-call?

Recently I went looking for a place to set-up my radio during lunch time. The location I've been looking for needs a couple of things.

Most importantly, it needs to be reachable within my lunch break - being self-employed, that's a little more flexible for me than for some, but it shouldn't be a 30 minute drive there and another 30 minutes back. For me, the location needs to be near water, accessible by car; I should be able to park next to the water, so my antenna ground-plane can reach the water and it needs to be away from houses with plasma screens.

In case you're wondering how my antenna system has been constructed, it's quite simple. I use a 12m squid-pole, think fishing rod on steroids, it's called a Spider-Beam. A local manufacturer made me a steel-plate with a pipe welded to it. I park a wheel of my car on the steel plate, put the squid-pole over the welded pipe and run a piece of wire to the top. At the bottom I have an SGC tuner, an SG-237, which plugs into the wire going up the pole and plugs the other end of the antenna into a ground-plane. Depending on where I am, the ground plane is a single wire running into a body of water, or it's a construction of 16 wires laid out in a ground mat. The Tuner plugs into my radio, the radio plugs into a battery pack and I can be on-air in less than 10 minutes.

It's clearly not a mobile set-up, and I don't use it at home where my radio is really only used on 2m and 70cm.

In order for me to use this contraption during lunch, I need to be able to get to the location, set up in short order and get on air and listen to stations around the bands.

I did in fact find such a location and plan to set-up there to start some listening tests. I found that Google Maps was very helpful in having a look-see before going physically to the actual site and the photographic data provided by Nearmap was helpful in determining how busy the location might be.

Looking for locations to set-up can be challenging. My current hit-list contains boat-ramps as a preference. Perhaps this might help you locate a place to get some QSO's during your lunch break too.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB