POTA Activation - Strouds Run State Park, US-1994, June 7, 2024

On a cool and windy June afternoon, Josh Senefeld, N8VXR, conducted a successful Parks on the Air activation of Strouds Run State Park, US-1994. This was Josh's 18th activation of the park on his hunt to complete the Oasis Repeat Offender Awards for 20 activations from the same Parks on the Air entity. Josh has also been hunting for the Kilo Award for making 1000 QSOs from the same Parks on the Air Entity.

Prior to this activation, Josh had 17 successful activations of Strouds Run with 793 QSOs, after this activation he now has 18 activations with 825 QSOs.

When Josh arrived to the park he headed to his usual spot, the picnic tables by the swim beach area. The spot was empty, however, he decided to check the Horsemen's Area off of Scatter Ridge Road. When he arrived he found a horse trailer and truck had been parked right in front of the picnic table. As it was to close to where he would've put his antenna he headed back to his usual picnic table. He arrived to the site around 1736 UTC and began to setup his station consisting of his Icom IC-718, Wolf River Coils 213” vertical whip with a window screen ground plane, all mounted on a ground spike, and fed with 25’ of RG-8X coax. He was on the air by 1743 UTC.

Josh's operating position.

His antenna.

Josh found his cell signal to be better than last time so he checked the POTA.app website in order to find some Park-to-Park QSOs. He found W0KAL was stopped on 14.253 and listen to a QSO where Josh found that there were 3 operators in 3 parks, in the Parks on the Air program this counts as 9 QSOs! At 1743, he made contact with W0KAL, KE0QEQ and N0OII in US-8185, US-4572, and US-0675 in South Dakota. Josh then tuned around the band and found 14.325 to be empty, he checked if the frequency was in use and then started CQ. The first station that answered was KO4YQT from Florida at 1754 UTC, his first Canadian QSO came a few minutes later with VE1BQC from New Brunswick at 1756. Some QRM started coming in from below him after a few more contacts so Josh moved up to 14.328 and checked if the frequency was in use, after getting no response he respotted himself and started calling CQ again.  His next round of Park-to-Parks would come back to back at 1804 and 1808 UTC with K0LBR from US-6359 in Oklahoma and then KK4MQN from US-2905 in South Carolina. KK4MQN was only coming in about a 33 and after that QSO Josh noticed that his QSO rate started to slow down significantly, in the lulls between QSOs, Josh check the band conditions online and found that there was a major geomagnetic storm that was causing deep QSB that Josh would notice in the rest of his QSOs.

The band conditions.

At 1825, Josh decided to change to 40 meters after a few more contacts on 20. He started off by hunting a few Park-to-Park stations, first was N4MQU from US-0935 in Virginia at 1831, then KE8BIT from US-11673, Great Council State Park, which is Ohio's newest State Park and he was activating during the grand opening of the park! Then Josh found 7.229 to be free and spotted himself then started calling CQ. The first station to respond was W4PUD from Tennessee at 1837 UTC. Then a few minutes later at 1839 UTC he got a call from N0SUL who was only coming in about a 11 from Michigan, he gave Josh a 42 signal report. After a few more decent sounding QSOs, Josh got his last Park-to-Park with KF0HSA from US-1793 in Missouri at 1858, marking Josh's 825th QSO from Strouds Run. 

Overall, Josh made 32 QSOs, 14 of them being Park-to-Park, in 1 hour and 15 minutes of operating time. All his QSOs were single-sideband and made with 50 watts of output power.