POTA #1

The local noise is back. Thankfully installing a choke at the radio has abated it somewhat, so I’ve been able to operate from home more this week than any time in the last month. No DX contacts on phone, and just few on FT8. At least I’m adding logbook entries.

To balance that, I had my first successful POTA activation today. I’ll call it an unqualified success.

My buddy K9MLP texted me this morning asking if I wanted to head to Ft. Harrison State Park, US-2256, for a POTA outing. His gear was packed and ready to go, so I just threw my laptop in a bag and headed with him to the east side of Indianapolis.

We found an unoccupied shelter, elevated his JPC-12 vertical antenna, fired up his FT-897, looked for an open frequency on 20 meters, and started calling CQ. We only had to call a few times before our first contact. From there we had a pretty solid half hour, racking up 21 QSOs.

When things died down we jumped up to 15 meters to give it a shot. No luck there. Same with 17. Back to 20, where we called CQ for several minutes with only silence in return. We gave up, grabbed a couple Park to Park contacts with other activators, and hung things up after about 90 minutes.

As the QSO map below shows, our contacts were all in a 800-1000 mile range, arranged in a nearly perfect circle. Two North Dakota contacts! We just needed a few in Ontario and Quebec to get full symmetry.

This was my first time ever calling CQ. It is a lot easier when activating as a POTA station, where the exchange falls into an expected range. Now that I’ve done it, there really isn’t an excuse not to call CQ regardless of setting.

We never had a large pile up, so did not have to navigate that. Which was perfectly fine on my first activation.

There was a DX station that popped up on our frequency late in our first run. I don’t know if they could hear us, and they were too low to interfere with any of our QSOs. Shame they weren’t a little louder and gave us a call, too.

I used the PoLo app, which seemed to work really well. I had practiced with it a couple times, but this was the first effort in the field. A little more comfort with it should make the next activation smoother. K9MLP used the World Radio League site to log his QSOs. He said it worked fine for him. It is nice to have multiple options.

Also nice? Having another set of ears to track callsigns. I’m sure that gets easier with experience, but I really admire the operators who almost always reply with a full call.

We just missed a few showers that skirted our area, and were a couple hours ahead of bigger downpours that rolled in later in the afternoon. In the heart of the afternoon rush hour destructive severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings sent me scurrying to the basement. No damage at our house. I’m thankful we were well out of the park when those storms hit.

My only failure of the day was not getting a picture of our site. I figure that’s the least dumb error you can make on a POTA activation.

One activation down, with a big assist from K9MLP. Looking forward to the next, and to using my gear.