Alana, Kevin and the kids headed over to eastern Washington on Wednesday. Our granddaughter Lainey had to move from her apartment in Pullman where she’s a student at Washington State University. They would be back on Saturday.

Thursday and Friday, Donna and I drove over to their place in Arlington to feed cats, water the potted plants and pick up mail and packages. It was uneventful on Thursday, but on Friday we found evidence of raccoons ransacking the cat food.

On our way back on Friday, we made a stop at Little Mountain Park. Donna discovered this park on one of her bicycle rides. Little Mountain Park is a 522-acre park just outside of town on the south side. The road into the park rises steeply to the parking lot at the summit, 934 feet above sea level. There are 10 miles of hiking trails in the park – most of them have steep climbs or descents. There are two viewing platforms – the south platform is adjacent to the parking lot and the north one is a short hike from there.

The south viewing platform overlooks the Skagit Valley with views of Puget Sound, Camano Island and Whidbey Island. On a clear day you can see the Olympic Mountains across the sound. We didn’t have a clear day – there was a lot of haze which you can see in the photos below. We’ll have to go back on a clear day.

One of the packages I picked up at Alana’s house was a tripod I ordered from Amazon. I used a great little tripod to mount the Comet GP6 antenna for my ham radio – very sturdy. I wanted to order another one to put up the Diamond CP-610 antenna for the 6-meter and 10-meter bands, but they were on backorder. So, I found a different one and ordered it.

I assembled the antenna and put it up on Friday. I wasn’t entirely happy with the new tripod – it seemed a little flimsy compared to the first one. The neighbors must think we have an antenna farm – they keep sprouting up.

The Diamond antenna is a bit of a beast. The actual antenna is 21 feet tall and has radials that extend about three feet, mounted on a 10-foot mast. After hooking it up, I played around on the 6- and 10-meter bands but couldn’t find a signal. Later, I took the antenna down – I didn’t trust the set-up in case it got windy overnight.

Saturday morning, I put the antenna back up. Just as I got it in position, I was distracted by Ozark the cat coming out of the coach. I’d left the door open – Ozark usually just stands or lays on the steps and looks outside, but she jumped out onto the grass this time. I let go of the antenna mast and went to retrieve Ozark. The antenna wasn’t stabilized and came crashing down, damaging the radials. I was lucky that it fell straight back across our site and landed in the grass without hitting anything else.

I disassembled the antenna and boxed it up. Lesson learned. I found a sturdy tripod on Amazon and won’t use the flimsy one again. Hopefully tomorrow, I’ll be able to order a couple of radials from Diamond. The radial extensions shouldn’t be much money and it’s an easy fix.

I’ve been having a blast with the ham radio. I found a repeater in Sequim – about 42 miles across the sound as the crow flies from here. This repeater is linked to something called the Winsystem. This links repeaters across the country and around the world allowing me to communicate over great distances by hitting the repeater 42 miles away! I had discussions with guys in Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona and Texas. It’s incredible, but I really want to try to make distant contact over the air – that’s why I got the bigger antenna.

The weather has been variable. We went from sunny and 85 degrees on Thursday to partly sunny and 78 on Friday, then cloudy and 76 on Saturday and they say we’ll be back in the mid-80s today with rain coming tomorrow!

*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and  I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!