Once in Ohio I stopped at Lake White State Park, this was in close proximity to a highway so I figured it would have cell services so I could spot myself and get a pileup going. I was able to get about 40 contacts in less than half an hour here. Not a great park, more of a boat launch that’s under construction, but it counts.

My next stop on the way to Dayton was Weavers Bend in the Cherokee National Forest. This was a great drive from the previous site in Georgia through the mountains into Tennessee. This site is 6 miles down a dirt road at the end and right on the French Broad River. There’s a train bridge in view that I didn’t think much of until 4am when the first train came thru and then one came through a couple more times during the early morning so I just got up and made a coffee and restarted the fire. I had put up the antenna in the early morning and heard great…

I drove up to the National Convention in Dayton, OH this year and stopped on the way in Georgia and Tennessee to camp and do some Parks on the Air Activations. My first stop was Lake Conasauga in north Georgia. This lake has a fairly traditional campground, which I normally avoid, but it’s way out there so there’s not electric and I figured it wouldn’t be crowded on a Sunday and Monday night. When I arrived on Sunday evening there were probably about 20 people around but by nightfall it was just me. This was a beautiful site but without cell service I struggled to get spotted on the POTA…

We had another SPARC in the Park event at Sawgrass Park in St Pete. A couple more new people came so I think it’s worthwhile. In total there were about 10 people. I made 20 contacts, mostly as a demo for the new people. Then W4WYR came with the fox and we had a fox hunt. This was my second fox hunt and I was able to find it this time. Though it was made easier due to the park only really having one direction you could hide it. Photos by N2ESP

I took the day off to get a IEEE tour of the Manatee Solar Battery, the world’s (currently) largest solar powered battery. On my way home I stopped to activate the Terra Ceia Preserve Frog Creek addon. I’ve activated the main Terra Ceia Preserve a few time, this is just down the road and a separate entity. From the looks of it, it’s mostly a place where people walk their dogs. It was windy and I had trouble with the hard packed sand ground holding my rope tripod of the 40ft mast (tipped over twice, which doubles my total lifetime tip overs). So I switched to the Wolf River Coil….

This year again I activated parks for the Florida State Parks on the Air event with Corey NF4Q. Corey registered the SES callsign W4E again which really does make it special. We did Terra Ceia State Park K-3663 again and Little Manatee River State Park K-1898. On Saturday at K-3663 we had very humid weather with a possible storm but we were done before the weather started. This time we only went about 1/4 mile into the park versus the 1+ mile we did last year. We had a visit from John who heard about it the night before at the SPARC meeting. On Sunday we activated Little Manatee River…