Parks on the Air is an amateur radio activity with a simple structure: take a transmitter to a designated park, make contacts from it, and log them. The appeal is that it couples radio to place — the activation is only valid from inside the park’s boundary, so the hobby becomes a reason to carry equipment into landscape.
EI3LH’s write-up of two days in County Kilkenny, Ireland is a good illustration, and it includes something most activation reports do not: binaural birdsong.
Recorded at Jenkinstown, IE-0057. Worth headphones.
The two days
Both parks were ATNOs — “all time new ones”, meaning nobody had activated them before. For a hobby with a leaderboard, that is the equivalent of a first ascent.
Coill an Fhailtaigh National Forest, IE-0056, one of Ireland’s 16 Millennium Forests. Setup was a Yaesu FT-891 with an ATAS antenna at 100 watts on CW — Morse code. Ten contacts in 16 minutes, finishing with 27 contacts in an hour and nine minutes, including Tennessee, Washington state and New York.
Then the detail that makes the write-up worth reading. A lunch-break test of an Elecraft KH-1 with a battery that had not been charged. Output was around 2 watts. That was enough for four contacts in Spain, Slovenia, Switzerland and Germany in 20 minutes.
Two watts
This is the part worth dwelling on, because the numbers are genuinely surprising to anyone who has not met amateur radio.
Two watts is less power than a phone charger delivers. It is a fiftieth of the 100 watts used in the morning. And on CW — Morse — it reached four countries across continental Europe in twenty minutes.
The reasons it works are instructive:
CW has an enormous processing advantage. A Morse signal occupies perhaps 100Hz of bandwidth against a voice transmission’s 2,500Hz. Narrow the receiver’s filter to match and you throw away 96% of the noise. That is roughly 14dB of signal-to-noise improvement for free, which is why CW gets through when voice does not — before you count the human operator’s extraordinary ability to pull a rhythm out of noise.
Propagation does the work, not the transmitter. On HF, signals refract off the ionosphere. When conditions are right, the path loss between Ireland and Slovenia is modest and two watts is plenty. When they are not, a kilowatt will not help. The operator’s skill is in knowing which band to use at which time of day.
And QRP is a whole discipline. Operating at five watts or less — “QRP” in radio shorthand — is a deliberate constraint with its own culture, awards and equipment. The Elecraft KH-1 is a pocketable HF transceiver built specifically for it.
Why this belongs in a creative-hardware publication
Because it is the same stack as a lot of installation work, pointed outward instead of inward.
A radio operator in a forest with a battery, an antenna they cut to length, and a logbook is doing field recording, site-specific practice and signal processing simultaneously. The equipment overlaps almost completely with what we covered in our RTL-SDR primer — antennas matched to a wavelength, the physics of propagation, and the discipline of listening to a band and recognising what is on it.
And the binaural recording is the part to steal. Binaural capture — two microphones at the spacing and in the acoustic shadow of a human head — reproduces the interaural time and level differences your brain uses to localise sound. Played back on headphones it is startlingly spatial in a way that stereo is not, because the recording already contains the cues your head would have produced.
For a forest it is close to ideal. The sound field is diffuse, the sources are distributed in three dimensions and moving, and the interesting content is quiet and detailed. A binaural recording of birdsong puts a listener in the place rather than in front of a recording of it, and the equipment is a pair of in-ear microphones and a portable recorder.
Pairing a transmission log with a binaural recording is a genuinely good documentation idea, and it is one almost nobody doing either activity has thought of. The log says this place reached Tennessee at 100 watts and Slovenia at two. The recording says and this is what it sounded like to be there. Together they describe a location in two completely different registers, and both of them are about how far sound and signal travel.