# It starts with a poor financial decision.

I recently attended Gophercon in Seattle. While I was in Seattle, I reconnected with an old friend who lives in West Seattle. He asked me, “What do you want to do? I’ve got a couple of e-bikes, we can ride down to the beach, get coffee and catch up.” That sounded great, so I walked down to the port and took the water taxi over to him.

He picked me up and drove me over to his really cute house in W. Seattle. He asked, “So do you want to take the e-bikes? They’re so fun”

It has been a while since I’ve been on a bike. I love riding bikes. Sadly, ever since the pandemic, I gain too much weight to be able to ride my road bike without risking breaking a spoke or the frame. My fitness has also become so bad that riding a bike hurts more than it is enjoyable.

I have missed riding my bike so much. I feel longing and jealousy whenever I see someone flying by on a bike. So when he said, “Do you want to take the e-bikes?” My heart was filled with excitement while I responded with a meek, “Sure that sounds like fun”.

We rode down to the beach to have coffee at Numa Coffee Bar. I felt alive again riding the bike. I was peddling, but the bike gave me enough assistance that it wasn’t painful.

After coffee, we continued around the coast. It was gorgeous out. The sun was shining bright, sparkling on the water. The sky was a bright blue. Sailboats were out on the water. I wish I had pictures to show you, but I was having too much fun riding on a bike.

We rode up a very steep hill that I would have never been able to climb up that hill without the battery assist. I yelled out to him, “You’re just showing off your bikes now!”. He laughed.

We stopped at a game shop called, The Missing Piece. It was a cute place. They have a café inside and a game library. I wish there was a shop like this near me. It was so cool that we could get a cup of coffee and play a game of Azul.

Needless to say, the e-bikes were so much fun that at 1am, I made a poor financial decision and bought a bike that I’ve been eyeballing for years, the Lectric XP4.

# The activation

Fast forward a couple of weeks. The bike is in my house, and I am watching bike content on YouTube. I come across a video of some bike packers touring the C&O Canal. I remembered that there was a POTA park on the C&O that was inaccessible from car.

When I was in the planning stages of my unfinished goal to activate every park in Maryland, I made a note on park US-7777: “I will have to wait until I’m bike mobile”. Well that day was now. I have a bike. I can activate US-7777!

What is more, I have an e-bike, I have the range to activate more than one park on the C&O in one go. There are a number of POTA parks along the Potomac River. So I opened up Ride With GPS and planned a route from US-7730 McKee-Breshers to US-0808 Clara Barton.

# The ham bike

I’ve been longing to have a ham bike even since I saw Jim “Ham on a Bike” operate from his bike. I knew it was inevitable that I would find a way to integrate ham radio with my new bike.

In order to do the 4 park activation, I needed to be able to roll up, set up the station, and activate the park as quickly as possible. Time was of the essence. I only have so much daylight to make it to each park, activate them, and ride back to McKee-Breshers.

The YouTuber, HamJazz put up a video 3 weeks ago where he installed CB mirror mounts onto his bike’s rack to create a V-dipole. That looked like a perfect solution. So that’s what I did. I bought two mirror mounts off Amazon and another 17’ whip from DX Engineering

In order to make a dipole. I have to connect the right whip to the shield of the coax. I accomplish that by using Mueller clips.

I already use those to connect radials to my vertical whip. They work great. My radials have a banana plug on the end of them, which plug into the clip.

I already have two sets of radials as part of my portable kit. It made sense to reuse them. To do that, I just had to make a little two-sided banana plug dodad.

# Prep

Before I took the bike out on tour, I wanted to try out the antenna. I rode it over to US-1596 Seneca Creek State Park and gave it a whirl. In addition to the new antenna, I was trying out a new toy, a QMX panadapter firmware for the M6Stack Tab5.

I’m quite impressed with this firmware. It uses QMX’s I/Q output to provide a waterfall as well as a FT8 app. The FT8 is probably the best portable FT8 app I’ve used. Much better than FT8CN or FT8AF in my opinion. The author is very responsive to my suggestions as well.

The Tab5 is so small, that it fits in my black tech pouch with the QMX. That pouch is an entire working FT8 station with an EFHW. I could theoretically take just that pouch to a park and activate it (assuming I have a way to get the wire in a tree).

# The tour - starting at US-7730

So I was ready for the tour. I had a working ham bike and a plan. Unfortunately this Saturday, it was supposed to rain all day. I was bummed. Next Saturday is Coffee and POTA, so I’d have to wait two weeks to do the tour.

I woke up Saturday morning and checked the forecast, no rain! The rain forecast had shifted to the evening. POTA ON!

So I rushed to get the bike together and I headed out about 11:00. I stopped and grabbed a bite to eat and made it to US-7730 McKee-Breshers around noon.

McKee-Breshers is a wildlife management area. Unfortunately is not a good place to activate from. There are no picnic tables anywhere. So I ended up rolling the bike into a field, set up the dipole, and activated from a folding camp chair.

The nice thing about the QMX panadapter firmware is that it has full CAT control of the QMX. I can simply put the QMX on top of my bag in the grass and hold the Tab5 in my hand. I can control everything by tapping on the screen.

I have activated McKee-Breshers before, so I was in and out. I completely forgot to take any pictures of this activation, but here’s the map of the QSOs

# Next stop US-7777

Now for the exciting part, the new park. I hopped onto the C&O and started riding South. I came across a bridge that required me to dismount and walk the bike. This was a good opportunity to take a couple pictures.

It started sprinkling while I was at McKee, so I covered my gear in a poncho. The raindrops stopped luckily This was the view from Riley’s Lock. I don’t know how’s house that is. I wonder what kind of war crimes they’ve committed to afford it.

A little longer down the C&O I entered the grounds of US-7777. I was looking for a place to activate from. I saw a little trail into the woods for a boat launch, that might be good. There’s more of Dierssen to go, let’s see if there’s a better spot. I kept riding and riding. Nothing but high grass and inaccessible wooded areas. I don’t know if US-7777 is going to happen. I kept riding.

I get to the next lock house, Lockhouse 22. Oh good, a bench. A great place to activate from.

Here’s the tab5 and QMX on the bench.

It was quite lovely here. There was lots of flowing water here that made it quite peaceful

Here’s the QSO map from US-7777 Unfortunately, after I uploaded the logs to POTA.app; I double-checked if I was within the bounds of US-7777, and I wasn’t. So technically these contacts are outside the park. I was at the Pennyfield Lockhouse. Close enough? I’ll have to try again another day.

# On to the Great Falls Tavern

Next stop was Great Falls Tavern. This isn’t a POTA park, just a really scenic area. I stopped real quick to grab a smoothie and a couple of waters from the ice cream truck there. Then I went sightseeing.

# Clara Barton and Glen Echo Park

After finishing up at Great Falls, I had to make a decision. It was about 16:30 local time, It would take me 30 minutes to ride to Clara Barton. That puts me at 17:00. The ride back to the car would take about 1 hour 30 minutes. Sunsets is 19:30. So I had basically until 18:00, no ifs, ands, or buts, to activate Clara Barton and Glen Echo Park. I was cutting it real close. I decided to skip Glen Echo Park this time, and just do Clara Barton.

So took off as fast as I could. I had to exit the C&O, climb up a huge hill and make it over to US-0808 Clara Barton. I already talked about Clara Barton’s house and Glen Echo Park on the post about my first activation there.

The last time I was at Clara Barton and Glen Echo Park, I activated from my car. I didn’t want to disturb folks while operating SSB with the FT-891. This go around, I was doing FT8 with the QMX, a silent affair.

There is a nice picnic table in front of Clara’s house, so I pulled the bike up next to it, extended the whips, and got to work.

It was a bit of a struggle. I started on FT4 to hopefully get my 10 contacts quickly. I collected about 4 or 5 QSOs on FT4 before that pool dried up.

I swtiched over the FT8 and begged the waves to flow my way. I heard my watch beep, 18:00… uh oh… times up. How many contacts? 8. Shit. I gotta go. Ok. I’ll call CQ one more time, then I’ll leave… A 2 station pile-up. Hell yes! We’re in. The two stations said 73 without incident, and I was golden. Time to pack it up.

Ok. 18:15. I have 1 hour 15 to get back to the car. The speed limit on the trail in 15mph. I had 21 miles to go. That’s 1 hour 24 minutes to get back if I went 15mph the whole way. I gotta try, but there’s no way. So I put the pedal assist on sport and cranked it.

My legs after all these miles were feeling a bit cooked, so I started using the throttle a bit more to give them some rest. I got to about Great Falls Tavern and there was some new drama. My battery level was at 40%.

Ok. I’m about halfway there, I should make it. I need to turn down the pedal assist and rely on these tired muscles. Legs don’t fail me now.

30%… uh oh….

20%… oh no….

10%… shit….

What happens after 10%? 0% blink. blink. blink.

Oh no.

I’m back at that bridge I have to walk the bike over. I’m still 15 minutes out, and I’m out of battery and out of legs.

I put it in Eco. Pedal a little. Throttle a little. Pedal a little. This isn’t good. When will the controller turn off? At any moment now I’m going to be stuck using these worn out legs.

So I carried on. The road never felt like it was ending. I was a big bag of anxiety as the twilight was fading.

The bikepackers were setting up camp next to the C&O. Time was running out. Then I saw it. The sign at McKee’s path onto the C&O. I’ve made it! 19:50. I’ve made it. Phew.

# Ending

Despite the stressful ending, this was a great day of biking and ham radio. I was able to try out a new antenna design, a V-dipole. I was able to give the QMX panadapter firmware a good test. I also learned the current range of my bike.

The V-dipole worked pretty well. The SWR can be a bit poor if the V is too close together. If the V gets too wide, the plastic thumb screws can give out due to the torque of the antenna weight. So it is a balancing act of making the V just wide enough before the thumb screws give out.

In addition, the mounts can pivot front to back. Sometimes the whips will fall backwards if I’m not careful.

I’m considering other options to make it more stable. There are some 3D printed V-dipole mounts and some aluminum ones. The bike and the antenna have left me penniless for the moment, so that’s a project for another day.

The QMX panadapter firmware worked great, but let be down in two ways.

The first issue was that there is a feature that counts the QSOs and tells you if you’ve activated the park. Unfortunately it didn’t take dupes into consideration. At each of the parks I stopped at 10 contacts, and at each park I had one dupe. POTA.app only gave me credit for 9 contacts for each park so I was unable to activate the parks. The developer quickly patched this when I submitted a bug report, so this is no longer an issue.

Another thing that went wrong with the firmware is that I somehow lost my log for Clara Barton. It keeps the log in the ESP32’s flash file system and mirrors it to an SD card. I must of cut power before it mirrored to log, because those entries weren’t present on the SD card.

The log entries should have been present in flash, but I accidentally cleared the primary flash storage when upgrading the firmware. So those contacts were lost forever.

I think the issue was due to user error, so I didn’t submit a bug report. If it happens again, I’ll make sure to document the issue.

As for the range of the bike. I think I will keep my trip distance at 30 mile, maybe 35 miles. 42 miles was probably too far. That said, the rush to get back to the car definitely reduced the range. I bet 40 miles would have been fine if I was on a casual ride.

I rarely did more than 35 miles on my analog bike when I was at my fittest, so being able to do 35 miles on battery while being out of shape is pretty dang good. The range can only get better as my fitness improves.

Overall, it was a great time. I hope you enjoyed reading about it. I hope to do this tour again real soon. I will have to get a much earlier start. I am also planning on riding the bike from Bethesda to DC to activate the monuments there, that will be fun. I’ve always wondered how I could activate the monuments, but the bike makes it easy to do a no-touch activation that I hope the park police won’t look twice at.