flwyd | 2024: A Year in POTA (Reply)

2024 was my second year of frequent participation in Parks on the Air, a ham radio activity that involves setting up a radio and antenna in a state or national park, talking to people around the country and sometimes internationally, and earning fake internet points. I once again managed to do multiple activations each month and hit a few fun milestones.

I operated from 36 parks from 23 counties in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Washington, DC. (I also joined two clubs in Virginia for Field Day.) In addition to over 3,000 contacts with stations in the mainland U.S. and Canada I talked to people in Australia, Barbados, Brazil, Ceuta, Chile, Dominican Republic, Easter Island, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Martinique, Mexico, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain, Sweden, Venezuela, Alaska, Hawaii, and boats and planes over the ocean. I made at least three contacts with every state and DC, and finally got a park-to-park with Rhode Island to fill the 51st slot on Worked All States. I made a park-to-park with every state but North Dakota and every Canadian province but Newfoundland and the territories in the north. And clever county-line positioning allowed me to get a pretty wild number of fake internet points in the West Virginia and Colorado QSO Parties.

On a trip to Hawaii in 2023 I realized the benefit of CW for weak-signal long-distance radio communication, so I set a 2024 goal of getting good enough at Morse code to make at least one CW contact with each POTA outing. I didn't stick to this practice in the latter part of the year, partly because I was worried about how well I could operate a paddle with gloves on, but I did manage 112 POTA CW contacts, plus a handful of contacts from home or work in the K1USN weekly Slow Speed Contest.

CW operating also enabled me to work the 30-meter band, which doesn't allow voice or other wide-band modes. This in turn helped me to get about half way to the POTA N1CC award: 10 parks with contacts on 10 bands. 80 meters has been tricky there: the usually high noise floor means my 45 watt portable station is challenging to hear. I got a shortened vertical antenna for 80m for easy deployment in parks without good trees, but have only really been able to make good contacts when I can loft over a hundred feet of wire into trees. I got some arborist throw weights and proper slick ropes, which has worked a lot better than my original "eye-bolts on fishing line" that was remarkably good at getting tangled. I still use an adjustable vertical when I'm doing a quick activation—throwing a wire antenna over trees and getting it back down again at the end can easily add an hour of "not on the air" time to an activation. But when I've got both time and good trees, the elevated wire makes a significant difference in the number of contacts I can achieve. Shout out to the wide-branch deciduous trees in Arkansas and West Virginia: Colorado's ponderosa pines are a challenge.

Some stats, generally counting "2-fers" as a single contact: