At the end of June, my family and I were staying at White Lake, NC, for our annual family trip to the lake. White Lake is surrounded by a number of POTA entities. One morning, I set out with hopes of activating 3 of these entities, but due to the heat and the “old man’s nap hour”, I was only able to activate 2.
First on the list was Singletary Lake State Park, K-2752. The parks offers two group campsites to the public, and to my luck, no groups had rented either site that week, so I had the entire park to myself. I strung up a 80m end-fed half wave antenna (Jim, KW4PW, built the 49:1 transformer for this antenna) extending from a bench, across a volleyball court, up my SOTABeams mast and back down to a peg on the ground to form an NVIS inverted-v. Radio used was my Elecraft KX-3. At this park, I quickly racked up 27 contacts (12 cw, 15 phone), all on 40m, packed up and took a walk around to explore. The first two pictures below are from this park.
Next up was Jones Lake State Park (K-2738). I setup at a picnic table, ran coax over toward the exercise equipment. Bungeed my mast to the pull-up bar And ran a 36ft random wire with 9:1 homemade unun as a sloper to the ground. Contact rate here was much slower going. I attributed it to the fact that it was now near lunch time, and many retired operators were probably napping. I spent over and hour putting 14 contacts in the logs (11 cw, 3 phone), including 1 cw contact, HA9RE, in Hungary. 3 of the contacts were park-to-park contacts. All the p2p stations were having to repeatedly call CQ, as the bands were very quiet at that point.
All in all, it was a great day, but boy was it hot! It was my last time playing with the kx3, which has since been sold and replaced by an IC-705 (The Elecraft is a better radio, but I needed vhf/uhf for satellite and vhf contesting work).
The pictures show up in the reverse order that they were added. The picture with the kids playing in the lake is from Jones Lake and the other two are from Singletary Lake.