We attempt to have a portable excursion every license course, and this time, we had two innovations: We would combine it with the ski world championship, and we would make it a POTA activation.
The Ski World Championship (Ski-VM) 2025 was placed in a POTA park NO-0259 “Bymarka nature reserve”. Our idea was to join “Studentcampen” for the skiathlon on Saturday, March 1, and set up enough antennas and radios for a POTA-activation there. Then we could take a break from the radio and see the race when the athletes passed.
Studentcampen set off an area for us. This was great since we needed space for the antennas, and they expected between 1000 and 2000 students to join.
After a short walk to Studentcampen from the bus, we found the spot they reserved for us. It was a relatively open space and away from the tracks that people would walk on. The last point was crucial, as it is quite disadvantageous to have too many strangers in our antennas.
The first QRV antenna was our vertical for 15m, this time with elevated radials. We have tried that once earlier, but then we anecdotally did not notice much of a difference from leaving the radials on the ground. After the discouragement, we have usually ended up with the easier option of ground radials. Since last time, we got a clear recommendation from David Burger VK2CZ / VJ2J, to elevate the radials. He gave us a nice visit earlier in the week.
We have earlier been to Fuglemyra, Gråkallen, Lavollen, and Fuglemyra, of which one is a SOTA-summit and two are POTA-parks. We have not done much POTA until now, which contrasts with our interest in SOTA. POTA does however have one advantage over SOTA: They allow club activations, which allows us to get licence course participants on the air.
We were quite quickly QRV on the 15m vertical and started calling CQ POTA with SSB. Our hope was that POTA-chasers would drive up the QSO-activity, but the
chasers either did not hear us or were not as interested as we had
hoped. Maybe they were all busy watching Ski-VM on television? Regardless, the campfire came along nicely, and we started heating sausages.
The second antenna up was our go-to multi-band antenna: Our inverted V doublet. We strapped it to a small tree and tied it to the surrounding trees. To avoid using excessive space, we sloped it quite steeply down. This gave us less gain, but omnidirectional antennas also have their benefits.
The doublet was not an immediate success either, but it did give a few QSOs after a while. One of them was Knut LA9DSA, whom we also spoke with on our equivalent trip last year. We also tried some CW at 15m and found that there were surprisingly many more responses there than on SSB. None of us are proficient in Morse code, but we still ended up with many more CW QSOs than SSB QSOs. Thanks to the POTA-chasers for their patience with us!
Eventually, the ski race started and most of us went to the ski slope to see. By now Studentcampen had been flooded with students, and most of them were lining up along the slope. It was possible to hear from the crowd that the athletes were closing in, and we got to see Klæbo take the gold in front of Nyenget and Amundsen.
After the race, people started moving more around, both homewards and across the patch where we had our antennas. The tracks that were there in the morning appeared to be replaced with more random ones. This went mostly ok, but a few spectators tripped over the radials. By now, the campfire had burned down, and the race was over, so most of us left for home.
The only problem was that we still were a few QSOs short of the 10 needed to activate the park. This was unsatisfying for three of us, who stayed half an hour longer to meet the threshold. Then, there was only one big challenge left: To get onto the bus home.
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