For a while now, I have been wanting to activate a new park, and last Tuesday offered the opportunity to do so. An overcast day in the low 40s with a chance of some rain in the afternoon was the forecast, and that’s good enough for operating from the car. My last try for a new park was to the north, so I figured to go in the opposite direction this time, and chose the Kickapoo River State Wildlife Area at Bell Center, K-4296. Driving down Hwy. 131 as it winds along the valley of the also-winding Kickapoo, it was hard to count the number of times one crossed the other, and one by one the little villages went by until I found myself at a patch of gravel by the side of the highway; one of the access points to the area.
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As I was setting up, careless handling (?) of the telescoping whip resulted in a split at one of the joints. Nothing was bent, one end still fit into the other, so this was quickly remedied with a few inches of duct tape.
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The repair was good enough and I was on the air in a few minutes.
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The magic of radio strikes without warning!
I was operating much as usual, looking for other POTA activations to work, getting a few here and there when a station I was calling announced he was QRT. After a decent interval I began calling CQ! One response, almost immediately. A few more CQs, and another. One or two more. Someone must have spotted me around this point, because suddenly I was working a pileup! I was the DX! I have been on the other end of pileups before, so I had some idea of how to proceed, and it was So Much Fun! My paper log tells me that I made 27 QSOs in 25 minutes; there’s no telling how long that it could have gone on, but the rising wind accompanying the rain brought my antenna down and that was the end!
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This time the whip got into the scrubby trees and snapped off a few inches from the butt, so this time it was a matter of overlapping the two ends and more duct tape; I was back on the air in about 15 minutes, but the frequency was in use, and I went back to hunting for other parks. This antenna is starting to look a bit beat up!
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I worked a few more stations just to test the repair, then closed up and went home. It was an inspired choice, because a few minutes later as I was driving away, it began to rain in earnest. I only really began to appreciate what I had done as I transferred my log from paper to digital; there were twenty park-to-park QSOs, including two contacts with dual operator stations in two-fer locations, plus my amazing run of contacts for a total of 47, a personal record.
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Tomorrow holds the nicest weather forecast in the next few days, so I am thinking about doing another activation; but where will I go?
Thanks for visiting driftlessqrp, stop by again soon!
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