What a fantastic time! Wow.
This is my second time up to K-1219 which you can find what I did the first time here. This time though I had time to both think through what I had issues with last time but also had my wife KB8OGP who wanted to activate the park after upgrading her license to a general. I have to say it was a great activation with almost no hiccups which was a pleasant surprise.
We started off by getting to the same picnic table that I was at last time so it was super easy to setup as I already knew exactly how I was going to set everything up. So I lashed the jackite pole to the picnic table, attached the dipole and coax, got it in the air and setup the radio. Gotta say I really like the setup as it’s been really easy going up, reception is great and gets out fantastic. Gotta love cheap wire antennas!
Again this time there was no cell signal so I went through the band and got a couple P2P (park-to-park) contacts and then found a clear frequency and started calling CQ. I had a contact come in right after the first CQ. Kinda fun when someone is right there ready to make a contact! After that first contact we started running the second operator and the rest of the contacts just flowed. I was the one calling CQ and once I had exchanged info simply asked to wait for the second operator and KB8OGP made quick work of completing her contact. Back to me, rinse, repeat. For never having run two operators it was a great feeling to just have the whole activation feel completely natural. We both made a good deal of contacts and then called QRT.
With the activation done we packed up and went for a short hike on the Mule Deer Trail. The views were fantastic as you can see from the pics below.
