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!