Saturday, the West Georgia Amateur Radio Society (WGARS) took to the field for the Spring Support Your Parks Weekend sponsored by Parks on the Air (POTA). WGARS is a pretty active club and one of the best I have belonged to. Besides local events like fox hunts and balloon launches (APRS), we take to the roads 4 times a year to a park. In the spring and fall we make the POTA Support Your Parks Weekend usually on a Saturday. For the winter and summer, we participate in Field Day and Winter Field Day.
Weather was cold, with fog. Temps were in the 50’s and not the mid 70’s predicted by the weather service. I was in shorts and a tee shirt. Luckily, I had a goretex windbreaker in the truck. Others had blankets wrapped around them.
These events are casual events for us. We normally do 3 things while out. We eat, we socialize, and we throw in a little radio along the way. This was no different. We had a picnic table full of food with hamburgers and hot dogs cooked on site by our President John WD8LQT.
Due to a lot of recent solar activity band conditions were interesting. John WD8LQT was runnning CW/SSB and I was running FT8 to reduce interference between the 2 stations. When I switched to 10 meters, I was working into Europe and South America and when I switched to 20 meters, I couldn’t get out of the Continental United States (CONUS). We each made a handful of contacts and spent a lot of time enjoying each others company.
For radios, John was runnning his Xeigu G90 at 15 watts into a EFHW antenna. I was running my IC-705 at 5 watts into my 28.5′ Random Wire antenna. Towards the end my radio developed a glitch and refused to transmit. I was using my iPad via WiFi to make the FT8 contacts and I think that connection caused a setting to change. When I got home and warm, it took me about 3 minutes to figure it out. I still had a pretty good day. Here is a QSO map from my station.
The goal of these event for our club is not how many contacts we make, but how much fun we have and a large part of that is enjoying each others company. Field Day is only a couple of months away — can’t wait.
Below is a short video. It is a little jittery as I had navigate around people and chairs etc. If you’re prone to vertigo, you may wish to skip this one.
kk4z.com 