Once again the St. Pete, Clearwater and Upper Pinellas radio clubs joined forces for a radio clubs in the park event. We met up at Eagle Lake park in Largo, FL. This is a nice county park so it doesn’t count for Parks on the Air but it was still a fun event.
Unlike Field Day where we setup specific antennas and radios to compete in the contest, everyone was encouraged to bring their own equipment to this event. I setup my 40ft Spiderbeam mast with a wire dipole antenna. Other people brought end fed antennas, ham sticks and a dual Wolf River coil. Band conditions have been really bad lately and I didn’t make a contact (I didn’t try very hard though). If you notice my QSO list on the right side, I haven’t been making many contacts recently.
One of the new things (to me) was the fox hunt. I’d heard of it and always wanted to try it. Lisa KC1YL (she was featured in the Sept issue of QST’s “Member Spotlight” so she’s kinda famous) and I teamed up to find the hidden transmitter in the park. Using my arrow directional antenna we walked pretty far and got really close but then got off track and didn’t end up finding the transmitter. Lisa didn’t give up and went back out with another group and eventually found it. I like the idea of the fox hunt, next time I’ll bring a water bottle and I’m going to look into some more technical solutions to the problem (signal attenuator for when it’s close and also some sort of Time Difference of Arrival system to get a direction on it maybe).
Unrelated, yesterday I received a Kenwood D72A full duplex HT I’d been waiting for a good price on QRZ for awhile. I’ll be trying out working FM satellites soon and I’ll make a post on how that goes.
