Hickey Street Reservoir Park

The radio band conditions looked good for the day and both Ralph and I were looking forward to getting out to a new park and making contacts under favourable conditions. Little did we know that the park had other ideas. The day being another hot one, we wanted a park with shade trees. The Hickey Street Reservoir Park looked like a good choice as it was not too far away, we had not been there yet and there were ample shaded spots. Ralph arrived at my place before our planned one pm departure, arriving early enough to leave by 12:45, traffic was light and we arrived at the park around 1:20. As we approached the park entrance, we encountered road construction making a lot of noise right outside the park entrance, not an encouraging start. The small parking lot was empty and I chose a shaded stall to park in.

Once parked, we got out to explore the area. The park is mainly a parking lot, tennis/pickle ball courts, some larger courts and unmanaged bush. We wandered around and saw that the bush had no trails through it so that area was not usable. The courts were atop the flat reservoir tanks and occupied most of the area. The parking lot had a shaded area on both sides so Ralph chose the eastern side, I went to the farther western end.  Along the east side of the park is a high-power transmission line so we couldn’t get too close to it. Ralph being on morse code took the closer spot to it as his signal would be less impacted by the line.

I reviewed the sloped ground on which to set up my mast and found the ground extremely hard. I had trouble getting my poles anchored it was so hard. Once the antenna was up, I set about preparing the radio. Even though I was in the shade the heat was causing me to sweat profusely making things uncomfortable. Once complete I turned on the radio and was immediately met with very high noise. The band was obliterated by local RF noise. The signal level of the noise was S8+. It would be impossible to hear anyone with that amount of interference. I took out my noise cancellation unit and placed it into the circuit. After adjusting it I was able to reduce the noise level to about an S5, barely usable.

With the radio ready I searched out a park activator and found one in Wisconsin. He reported my signal as reasonable but I could barely hear him through the static. I decided to reduce the width of my band filter to eliminate some more of the noise. This helped a bit more with reducing the noise. I then selected a frequency and began calling. It took awhile but I eventually worked a station in Illinois followed by Ohio and then a strong signal from Arizona. It was now time to check in with Ralph he said he had only 3 in his log compared to my 4 so we decided to keep going for another 15 minutes.

It was slow going despite the good band likely because I couldn’t hear many of the stations trying to reach me. By the half hour point I had only 9 contacts, one short of the needed number. Ralph was also getting close but he needed a few more. We kept up the effort and by the 50-minute point I had reached 14 stations and Ralph 12. We had both felt it had been a tough day and agreed that we had enough. So, despite what we thought would be a nice activation with good band conditions turned out to be a very tough activation at a park that really didn’t want us there. This was a park for ball players only even though none were there until just before we left when a couple of women drove in to play.

The park looks like it would be a great spot for exercise with lots of ball courts and good evening lighting. The flat-topped reservoir was ideal for the ball courts. It offered little else as there were no level grassy spaces nor hiking trails. We were both glad to be done with it. On to Starbucks for a cool drink.