This was a fun one. I went out to Terra Ceia Preserve State Park. It’s less than a 30 minute drive and not much of a park, more of a swamp with a dirt road you aren’t allowed to drive on. I had a failed attempt at an activation in Big Cypress due to being too close to the powerlines I think so I didn’t want to operate from the parking lot on this one. For this activation I packed everything into a backpack, it weighed in at over 20lbs. My girlfriend and I walked in just under a mile, that’s about as far as I’d want to go with that much weight.
I setup the 20m dipole just off the path near the first big swamp pond. I had my antenna analyzer and it checked out at 1.2 on 14.280 so I figured I would start there. When I powered up the radio it was on 14.308 so I slowly tuned down and found K0ATZ calling “CQ POTA” on 14.304. I immediately called and he called me back for my first park-to-park contact. Just after that K7CAR got on and he was at another park so we had a 3 way park-to-park contact. Pretty cool way to start it.
I ended up running a pileup for 45 minutes straight and got 72 QSOs before the no-see-ums started biting too much so we got out of there. My 7Ah battery didn’t have much left either. I’ll be looking into lower the weight of my kit now that I’ve had a successful backpack portable op.
