Lat week I found a window of time to go play radio! The night before, I spent some time looking at the POTA map and tentatively decided on going to Buckhorn S. P., one that I never activated before, though it is not far away.
The day dawned chilly (in the ‘teens), breezy, and sort of overcast as I drove there, but soon after I got set up the sun was shining through a few remainng wisps of cloud. Buckhorn is a big park, and one I am not very familiar with (yet), so I drove around a bit looking for a good spot, and found a nice one in Hunter Parking Lot A, adjacent to the Buckhorn State Wildlife Area.
Setup was routine, and there was a park on the air just 1 kHz away when I turned on the radio. The op was just calling “last call”, so I was his last QSO before going QRT. There I was on a nice clear frequency, so after a decent interval and a few “is this frequency in use?” calls I started CQing and self-spotted.
WOW! What a response! For most of 45 minutes I was working a pileup! So many stations calling it was hard to catch a whole callsign; usually I had to say “station ending in alpha zulu?” or “the kilo echo 5 again please?”.
When it was all over I had 42 contacts logged, and only one blank page remaining in my logbook!
Possible twofer?
When I looked at the map today I noticed that during my activation I was easily within 100 feet of the Buckhorn State Wildlife Area, a new POTA entity as of a few days ago: US-12077.
Hmmm, no, the 100 foot rule only applies to trails / trailheads; merely adjacent is not good enough to generate a twofer, the entities must overlap to meet the stricture of “100% within the park”. Oh, well, no twofer.
This minor error tells me I probably should re-read the rules; maybe even print a copy for reference purposes.
Thanks for visiting driftlessqrp! I hope to get out again soon!
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