May 2, 2020

POTA K-6317 Moody Branch WMA

Finally got out of town, probably should have just been doing parks this whole time, there was the normal (large) amount of traffic on the Skyway bridge heading over to Parrish, FL where this park is. This is one of the newly added Wildlife Management Areas in Florida and it hadn’t been activated yet. When I arrived there was a woman on a horse. She said she’s been around there for 6 years and I’m only the 4th person she’s ever seen there. The was also a children’s playground that looked like it had never been used. There’s a covered pavilion right at the entrance, no table but I brought…

April 29, 2020

Over 400 QSO’s in the Florida QSO Party!

I had a great time with the Florida QSO Party over the weekend. Normally a bunch of us do the contest from the club station, and we won Top Florida Club the last two years. With the antenna damage and the virus we weren’t able to do that this year so I used my home station. I ended up with 403 contacts with 367 of them in CW. This contest is everyone trying to contact all the counties in Florida. Since I’m in Florida I got all of the CW contacts from calling CQ. The CW Academy classes are really paying off. At one point I got 91 contacts in…

April 15, 2020

All bands open!

Brief update: I’ve mostly been practicing CW during this stay-at-home order. We did the club meeting via 2m this month, that went ok. The weather’s been really nice, it’s a shame all the state parks are closed. Yesterday my cheapo web hosting server crashed and that was the last straw with them so I’ve switched to a more reputable host (that costs twice as much, $10/mo). The site should be much quicker to load from now on. Band conditions have been in and out but when they’re on it’s been good. On Sunday I saw Fiji pop up on the DX cluster on 12m during the evening. I’ve had good…

March 17, 2020

SPARC in the Park 2020

We had 15 people show up for the SPARC in the Park event. I brought my Wolf River Coil and setup the KX2 and FT-891. I mostly played with the KX2 CW paddle as I hadn’t tested it out yet. It will take some getting used to. I made a POTA contact and one contact with Billy KN4LUZ in the parking lot. Tom NY4I made a few satellite contacts using the Icom 9700. I spent about 5 hours here, it was a fun time.

March 6, 2020

4 POTA activations in one day!

I planned on doing one activation, seeing how I felt and then maybe doing another. My first planned activation was K-6310, the Holey Land Wildlife Management Area. A bunch of new Wildlife Management Areas were recently added to the POTA list of parks in Florida. This was the first activation of K-6310. Holey Land is located about 6 miles down a nice paved road off US-27 which is an alternate route I sometimes take back from Miami instead of Alligator Alley. Shortly before the entrance to this area there’s a nice boat launch that I thought was the spot. Looking at the map I needed to go a little further…

March 5, 2020

K-3618 Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park

This is a big park right next to K-4634 that I activated previously. This park is 120 square miles and has basically one road going through it, James Scenic Drive. This is the road I thought I could get to from K-4634. Quite a few cars drove (maybe 6) while I was activating. I’m not sure what the other people are up to. One guy stopped and shut off his truck to ask what I was doing, I think he was expecting something else because he left almost immediately after I explained it. I started on CW and made 10 contacts then switched to SSB. Sideband was almost instant pileup,…

March 1, 2020

Completed CW Academy Intermediate course!

I’ve completed my 3rd CW Academy course and signed up for their final “Advanced” class that will start in a month. These classes use the online video conference program Zoom. We had 5 students, 1 instructor and 2 associate instructors. Everybody made it through this one which is good, it’s a hard skill to learn and at least one person dropped out of my previous classes. One of the differences in this class and the previous ones was the emphasis on getting on the air. Each week we set Get On The Air goals. This definitely improved my ability and has gotten me to start doing my Parks on the…

March 1, 2020

North American QSO Party RTTY February 2020 – 142 Contacts!

I made a decent amount of contacts in the 5 hours I operated this contest. 2 contacts with Hawaii. I had a conference earlier in the day so I made a late start. 40m had a lot of QSB so I’m hopeful I was able to complete some of the contacts as I lost contact before getting the Thank You (TU) message from some of them. I’d really like a bigger antenna. I googled around for them after the contest, the one I like is 80ft long and would need a large tower to hold it. Someday.

February 18, 2020

VP6R QSL Card

Got a new QSL card from the VP6R DXpedition. I made so many contacts with them it required 2 cards. First time that’s happened.

February 17, 2020

K-3624 Gainesville-Hawthorne State Trail

This was my first activation where I got the required 10 QSO’s using CW. I was sitting on a bench so I wasn’t the most comfortable working the key but I got it done. I seem to have an issue sending CQ POTN instead of CQ POTA. I’ll figure that out eventually. This part of the trail I went seemed to be abandoned. I saw a couple people ride by on bikes, two of them just as I was pulling up, luckily I was going slow. I liked this spot, it was peaceful and quiet, good spot for activating. But I have a thing for abandoned places. We had lunch…