Photo by Rob Slippey
POTA Activation - US-5636 - White Nursery State Forest, MO
Another activation is in the logs. This was a rather rainy experience but worked out just as well. Below are some of the highlights of the area.
Area overview
The drive in was quite nice. Winding and hilly with sharp curves at times, it was quite a nice drive in. On entry to the park, there are a few places to park right near the road. There wasn’t much else to see at this park. It was quite small of a park and as you can imagine from the name, there are a few fields for tree growing.
Antenna Selection & setup
I diverged from my original antenna plan here. As I mentioned in my last article, I’ve been having some issues with my Buddistick vertical antenna. On that note, I finally pulled the trigger and ordered a Chelegance MC-750 vertical. Fortunately, I was able to get that shipped to my hotel and look forward to it’s arrival.
For this trip I had a few ideas for how to prevent the mount on the buddiestick from falling over.
However, those ideas were unnecessary. Chris graciously allowed me to utilize his antenna for this activation, which worked out really well.
Chris started off this activation on 15 meter CW. He quickly achieved an activation and handed off the coax to me. I managed 2 contacts on 15 SSB but as I reported on in my last article, it appears operators discount 15 meters too early in the evening and regardless of receiving good signal reports out to the east coast, no other responses came.
Moving up to 20 meters, things got much much better with a total of 42 contacts.
I don’t have much more to add to this article. Future me here, truth be told I got really busy and it’s now December 30th as I finish this article. I really need to keep up on these activations articles. I find they’re great to look back on and see where I’ve changed my kit and what’s worked and didn’t work but I actually need to write them for them to be useful.