My wife and I decided that Easter weekend would be a good one for a camping trip. It turned out to be a quick one and one that we did without the kids because, well, they do a lot of camping with the Scouts and just weren’t feeling up to it. So my wife, our Rottie, and I jumped in the car and drove off to Salt Fork State Park [K-1989] for a bit of relaxation. The drive down was only rough in that Bella gets carsick. We made it almost all the way to the campsite (90 minutes!) before she coated my shoulder in dog vomit. Sigh. That’s as bad as it got for the entire trip, so that’s not bad.
While my wife was checking in, I set up our tent. We call it The Log Cabin 9000 because it’s big. When we got it, the kids were just tiny so it seemed silly. With all of us now? Less silly. Anyway, I got it set up with very little assistance from my four-legged friend.
With that done, and no car to unload just yet, I got the antenna set up. I went with the Chameleon whip again. I had my end-fed along for the ride, but this was going to be a little easier due to where the available trees were. The truth is, Bella isn’t very good on a long lead and I didn’t want a lot of wire around camp. So I kept the antenna on one side of camp and ran the radial out as far in the other direction as possible. I powered up and got on the air. Once again, I used my IC-705’s GPS to sync my tablet clock. That’s a setup that is really working for me. One less thing to drag along!
As with most times I start up at a park, just including POTA in my FT8 message is enough to start a bit of a pile-up. I had 5 or so waiting in line. FT8 pile-ups are weird to manage because you have to be doing a lot of pointing and clicking. Most people are patient and send every other sequence rather than every shot. All in all, it only took me about 40 minutes to get the park activated. Which was great because by the time I was finishing that up, I was needed for some meal prep.
My plan was to do a late shift, but we got more rain than we expected that night and it just didn’t sound like fun. We turned in early and enjoyed the sounds of the mud building up outside the tent.
I don’t have a PSK Reporter map for this one because I was offline. But for posterity, here’s the log:
Wrong log… Here we go…
K4QAL EM50 20m
W4TTZ EL98 20m
NB7B DN31 20m
N7WFK EM15 20m
K4AOQ EL98 20m
KE8RNQ EM79 40m
W9AV EN43 40m
KE6EX EN52 40m
AD2CD FN20 40m
W4GMN FM29 40m
KN4COE EM79 40m
VA3MJR FN03 40m