HF Portable Ops Solar Powered

By VE6AB

“This day finds me out operating HF portable from the top of a high butte overlooking the Red Deer river valley badlands of southeastern Alberta.
I am not the first person to set up camp on this butte, as I was set up beside a tipi ring, signifying the fact that first nations people had been using this spot for setting up their tipi’s for many years past.
If you expand the photo and look at my vertical antenna with its guy-lines, you can visualize a tipi sitting in this spot, chosen for its commanding views in all directions over the grasslands.

The owner of the ranch who’s land this butte is located on, was telling me that back in the 1800’s, the Hudson’s Bay company had established a fur trading fort on the banks of the Red Deer river, the location of this fort only several kilometers from my location on this butte.
There are tipi rings to be found all along the ridges of this range of buttes and hills located east of the ghost town of Dorothy AB throughout the grasslands bordering the Red Deer river.

Earlier in the pre-dawn darkness, I had left Calgary with plenty of time to reach the grasslands located in the Wintering Hills of southeastern Alberta, where I hoped to catch the sun rising over the beautiful rolling grass bordering the badlands of the Red Deer river. Once I reached the end of the blacktop of highway 564, I planned on working my way north through these hills that roll down against the badlands bordering the Red Deer river. I already knew my destination on the day where I would be setting up to operate HF portable from a butte overlooking these grasslands. Off the end of highway 564, you drive a twisting backroad that descends through the badlands to a cool girder bridge on the Red Deer river, and after you cross this bridge, it is just a short distance to the ghost town of Dorothy.”.…READ MORE