Activated Lake Manatee State Park today. I had driven past this one coming from Beker-Wingate State Park K-3607 and had it on my list. My girlfriend, Amanda, likes to find geocache’s while I’m doing the radio and it looked like there were a lot of them at Lake Manatee when I looked back then. Unfortunately it seems they have removed most of them. We found a couple outside the park on the way back. She’s working on her technician ticket so she can activate some parks too.
The ARRL DX SSB contest was still going on so I built a 17m dipole before we left hoping that I could get some contacts on that band since it isn’t included in the contest. I was able to get one contact with Brazil right away but then no more contacts on 17m for almost 20 minutes so I switched to 20m. I had worked the contest a bit before I left. Next time I will either not go out on a test weekend to activate or I will not work the contest from home so I can get the contacts while I’m out. This was a difficult one due to so many people on the bands that I only got the minimum 10 contacts for the activation.
