I had a chance to make a Pandemic day trip to Pinnacles national park this wee and spent the night in the main camp ground. I didn’t have a lot of time to play radio unfortunately, I did get a chance to try to hit the repeater from the campsite.
The repeater with the best?/closest? coverage appears to be the South County-VHF – Pinnacles” repeater:
- 146.625 Mhz Offset: -0.600 Mhz PL: 94.8
- Pinnacles National Park
While I was not able to get into the repeater from the camp ground with my stock antenna, once I put my rollup j-pole over a tree branch at the picnic table I was able to raise the repeater. My guess is that I wouldn’t be able to depend on my rubber ducky while hiking around the park, but if I was on a peak or brought along my j-pole I’d be fine.
I didn’t try to bring anyone up on 2m simplex since the park was pretty empty, though would have if I had gone hiking along the peaks / ridge line.
I brought along the FRS radios for the family and they worked very well on our various bike rides around the park. We got about a mile or two from the campsite and were always able to get a good link back and forth. (We were able to talk anywhere along the right hand side of the V in the map above.) My guess we’d have a tougher time on the other side of the V due to how the hills and valley are aligned.
I set up my Yaesu VX-8R to listen to shortwave as we lay down to go to sleep but fell asleep as soon as the lights went out so no report there!
Pinnacles was already 90-100 degrees during the day at the end of June, though at night it got cooler (sweatshirt and pants weather). Dangerously hot during the day. We did some bike riding, but mostly stayed under a tree with a blanket and read during the heat of the day.
Saw people walking the trails along the road but no one on the ridge lines. My guess if people were up there it would only be in the early morning or evening. Hard to carry enough water to make it up there and back,
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