K8HGY
Patagonia Lake Island, AZ025L

These shots are from Patagonia Lake Island AZ025L in Santa Cruz , AZ. I was visiting family near Phoenix and brought my IC 706 with me, Scott Kerr who helped me qualify Parker Canyon Island suggested that there was another lake near Patagonia, AZ that had two Islands and wanted to know if we could try another. So sent off an e mail to see if we could get an ok. I did not have a generator but Scott said he could arrange the boat and a generator.

We drove from Queen Creek, AZ to Parker Canyon Lake and stayed overnight. (3 1/2 hrs) The next day we loaded up the boat and the radio gear and drove to Patagonia Lake which was about an hour. The generator Scott provided was an inverter Honda and I was concerned about RF noise with that generator so before we unloaded the boat at the lake we fired up the generator and tried the radio with a dipole laid out on a few bushes. The noise from the generator was very bad with an S-7 noise level. Scott we check with the boat rental store to see if they would rent us a battery. We were able to rent a trolling battery for $5 which ran the rig all day.

We put up a dipole as an inverted V and the SWR was good on the first try. I Island has a picnic table and a fire pit for people camping out but we were the only ones there that day. Scott does not have a ham ticket but I think I have him hooked. He is in the blue jacked, I am in the white shirt. We had to be back in Phoenix by 1900 hrs so we had to quit shortly after meeting the goal .

We worked 7 DX stations. To include Spain, Ireland, Vancouver Island several VE7s. 28 stations total. We had to close at 1430 hrs after starting at 1100 hrs. Rich K8HGY