Category: Contest Report

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POTA Report: K-1893 Lake Louisa State Park – Contest Report: Florida State Parks on the Air – April 2023

April 1st and 2nd was Florida State Parks on the Air. For this event I ventured down the road again to Lake Louisa State Park. However this activation was a bit different.

POTA is a lot of fun, but it’s always more friends. This time I brought Ian, W4NAI, with me for his first activation. Ian is a seasoned ham, but doesn’t have a station at home, so he takes advantage of any opportunity to get on the air.

Ian did many of the initial contacts while I logged. He wasn’t used to getting a pileup and having to work a bunch of folks calling the park.

Again I used an end fed antenna, but this one was home made. I first used this setup for Field Day 2022 and decided to use it again for this activation. The antenna is a long wire with a 9:1 unun. There is also a 1:1 choke before the tuner. This setup tunes well on anything from 6 meters to 80 meters. (And I can sometimes get 160 meters if I have enough coax.)

The antenna was put with some arbor line and a weight. We did have the antenna come down mid way through when I was trying to adjust it. This took us off the air for about 20 minutes. We were going to try Ian’s Buddipole but didn’t have the adapters to use with the FT-817.

Overall we operated for about 4 hours and made over 100 QSOs. We worked a ton of Georgia parks and only connected with one other Florida park. We worked states as far north as Minnesota and as far west as Oklahoma. It was a great experience and we cannot wait to do it again!

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Contest Report: Collegiate QSO Party

I had a blast on the Collegiate QSO Party, but it’s not shown in my score. As one of the event organizers, I just wanted to have fun with it. I made it a goal to only work school and try and spot as many as I could.

I spent most of the weekend monitoring social media and seeing what the 37 participating schools posted. This was a record year for school participation and it was a ton of fun to see spots popping up online and all the conversation. I had my radio going as well and got to hear a few folks make their first QSOs, which was a ton of fun. I also enjoyed listening to the pileups.

When things did calm down, I did try to get in a few QSOs. While I spent a lot of time on voice, I took advantage of the generally slower CW speeds to try my first QSOs! I was happy to make two: W4ODU, Old Dominion University, and W9HHX, Milwaukee School of Engineering. I was able to head copy all of the exchange. There was a lot of noise when I went to work W9HHX, but we made it happen! I had to send my exchange a few times for him to copy.

With 189 claimed points, I’ll take that. It was a good bit of fun and I got to make some unique contacts.

We are just a week after the event, but I already have seen over 20 logs submitted with 50% being from individuals. This was a super exciting year and I cant wait to start processing logs. It will be a few months before we have our winners announced, but I cannot wait for next year!