POTA Activation - Wayne National Forrest, US-4521, April 26, 2024

On a breezy April morning, Josh Senefeld, N8VXR, conducted a successful Parks on the Air activation of the Wayne National Forrest, US-4521, his second stop on his hunt to complete the POTA Rover Warthog Award for activating 5 Parks on the Air references in a single UTC day.

Josh arrived to Utah Ridge Pond around 1445 UTC and found a few cars in the area from mountain bikers out on the Bailey's Trail System. He found the picnic table to be empty and set down his gear and started to unpack and deploy his antenna. He decided to continue to operate on the 40 meter band, so he re-attached his Wolf River Coil Sporty Forty coil to the base of the 213" whip. His station consisted of his Icom IC-718, Wolf River Coils 213” vertical whip with a window screen ground plane and Sporty Forty coil, all mounted on a ground spike, and fed with 25’ of RG-8X coax. Josh decided to also continue to use the newest version of the HAMRS logging application (v 1.0.7) on his Evolve III laptop. He was on the air by 1452 UTC.

Josh's antenna with Utah Ridge Pond in the background.

Josh's gear all packed up before leaving.

Josh found 7.266 MHz to have a neighbor down a few kilohertz who seemed to be tuning an amplifier, so he checked around the band and found 7.224 MHz to be free and after making sure it wasn't in use, he spotting himself of the POTA website and started calling CQ. His first contact was with W0CGC from Tennessee at 1454 UTC, then he got a Park-to-Park QSO with KQ4MSQ from US-3842 in North Carolina. Much like at Strouds Run, Josh had a nice little run of contacts afterwards with WD4OL, N3DOG, N4EMP, N1WMM, AB8LL, K4TEP, KF4RAL, and W4RZ. Just like that Josh had his 10 QSOs and made a few more calls to see if anyone else was waiting around the frequency before packing up! Josh was now off to Burr Oak State Park, US-1939, and the North Country National Scenic Trail, US-4239.

Overall, Josh made 10 QSOs, 1 of them being Park-to-Park, in 8 minutes of operating time. All his QSOs were single-sideband and made with 50 watts of output power.