For my third park activation I found myself with some time as the family was gone and I couldn’t join them because of work. So after work I was looking at the weather and we were supposed to get rain about two hours out from when I took a look. As K-0225 is pretty close I packed up the radio as quickly as I could and got in the car.
Now to pack up I “needed” to change up how I was setting up. In all honesty the setup I’ve used for the previous two activations still works great but I’ve picked up my first new radio (if you skip over a Baofeng handheld). I had been fitting everything into a backpack but the new radio is a little bit (a lot) bigger. So I figured I’d try with the new radio and putting everything into a plastic tote. Now I have two radios so I can pick the best and if it’s an activation that I can jump out of the car to a picnic table I can take the new radio but if there is a little hiking that I need to do I can take the IC-706 in the backpack.
The first time I activated this park I hiked into the park a bit and setup on the side of the trail. This time I was going to try and work out of the back of my vehicle. Ended up working fairly well with only a couple hiccups. The first one was there were some big mud puddles in the parking lot and came really close to losing a boot when I slipped into one. I also lashed the jackite to the end of a wooden fence to I stretched on section of the dipole and tied it to some tall grass. Was a little worried it would break off but the wind was low and hey, it worked!
The activation itself worked really well and got to try the memory calling on the new rig. Worked really well and makes me want to setup a remote for activating the memory calling. So Yaesu makes the FH-2 which can do just that but part of ham fun for me is making things so I found this video (link) which shows how to make my own. Now as of writing this I haven’t gone through and soldered it up because adding another thing to my POTA kit for setup and wires feels a little overkill right now. We’ll see if it stays that way.
Was able to get 30 contacts and really enjoyed my time. I also timed it just perfectly as it started raining as I was packing up!
Pics of the activation:
