POTA in the Caribbean with the new POTA ARRAY

John Gendron
Nov 2
2 min read

Updated: Nov 2

I was on St John in the US Virgin Islands a couple of weeks back and decided to take a radio and gear to activate VI-0001 Virgin Island National Park. I have activated the park in 2018 and 2022 with a DX Commander antenna and an Aetherwave 10-40 OCF dipole.

This trip I took two of the Alpha 17.75ft whips with ground mount stakes and 4 radials for each antenna. The radio was a Yeasu FT-891. I was able to pack all of the radio gear, cables, new POTA array units, and my laptop in a 3-day backpack. I did carry the whips in my checked baggage. I did not travel with a battery, I purchased one on island.

I tested the unit from 2 places within the park, Maho beach and Cinnamon Bay beach.

The unit preformed well, in the portable environment. I logged 45 contacts in 30 minutes the first day from Maho with poor band conditions on 20meters. I worked 104 contacts from Cinnamon on 10/23 in about 50 minutes. I worked 2 Japanese stations, 1 Indonesian station, 2 Aussie stations and a bunch from the EU and North America.

On 10/24 I worked 65 contacts in 30 minutes from Cinnamon. The beaches on St John start to get crowded early so my time on air was limited. I was setting up to go active at 11:00UTC and compete by 12:30UTC. The set-up time was right at 20 minutes start to finish. I saw about 18dB of front to back isolation and I estimate about 3dB gain over a single vertical. That is significant when you consider you are seeing quite a boost off the saltwater as well. We are in pre-production and testing the prototypes of the POTA array and should have production units available by year end.

The Alpha whips on the beach at Cinnamon Bay Beach you can see the relay network on the rock between the antennas.

My radio set up on the rock, I connected the radio to the relay network via a 50ft piece of RG58A/U cable and the controller was connected via a 50ft 4Conductor cable with RJ11 Modular plugs.