Here's a picture of my operating location and equipment for the Sprint. Since I could only operate for about 30 minutes before the park closed, I packed lightly and didn't bring my telescoping mast and tripod mount.

The antenna is my handheld Arrow II Satellite Antenna without the 2m elements, which are still packed away in the purple rollup bag on the left. The tranceiver is my handy Yaesu FT-817ND all mode rig. Attached to the clipboard was a log sheet for recording contacts. Grid squares are exchanged during contacts.

Here's a close-up shot of the FT-817 sitting on the rock. I used the front BNC connector to connect to the Arrow handheld antenna. Since there weren't that many stations on the air at the time, I stayed on 432.100 MHz USB.

Here are the contacts I logged for the Sprint in about a 30 minute period:

Callsign	Grid square
KC6ZWT	CM98
K6EU	CM87
W6IZU	CM98
WA6QAK	CM98
WA6ZKY	CM98
WA6AZP	CM87

As you can see it wasn't very busy that evening. KC6ZWT (Norm near Placerville) later reported working 15 QSOs and 7 grids, with his best DX to Corona in SoCal. Impressive!

While operating for the Sprint, I held the antenna in my hand. Although this can get tiring after a while, it does make it easy to make quick adjustments in direction and polarization as required.

This setup worked quite well. KC6ZWT reported my signal as "30 over" at his location near Placerville, approximately 120 miles away. I was running the FT-817 at the highest power setting of 5 watts during the Sprint.

In my 4-16-05 Summit Rock hilltopping report, I mentioned that I was concerned about a higher than normal SWR reading that my Yaesu FT-817 was showing when I was operating the Arrow II Satellite Antenna (minus the 2m elements). I sent an e-mail to Arrow Antennas and they suggested I try adjusting the gamma match to see if I could lower the SWR (the antenna is designed for satellite operations at a slightly higher frequency range).

Before adjusting the gamma match, I hooked up an SWR meter to see how high it really was (I didn't have a good feel for the calibration of the LCD SWR bar graph on the FT-817). The SWR reading on 432.10 was about 1.5:1, which is lower than I expected and definitely acceptable for operating the FT-817. I still decided to try to lower the SWR even more, but I wasn't able to loosen the screw on the shorting bar (they tighten it well at the factory to ensure a good connection).

Not being able to adjust the gamma match turned out just as well because while I was taking more SWR measurements, I stumbled on a way to lower the SWR. I found that if I kept the coax away from the boom as it left the BNC connector on the antenna, I could achieve a SWR of about 1.1:1. I don't have an explanation for this other than a problem with the connector on the coax. If you look closely at this picture, you can see a piece of black electrical tape on the reflector element that is holding the coax away from the boom.

I managed to snap a few quick pictures on the way back to the parking lot. Here's what the back side of Summit Rock looks like with more light than I've had for other pictures I have on my website.

Here's a shot of the trailhead for Summit Rock.

There's plenty of parking space at the trailhead lot. There were four cars when I arrived, but I was the only one there when I got back to the lot.