The weather this weekend was not nice enough (for me) to seriously consider taking the Portable Station out any of the local POTA Parks as I had previously mentioned. Although the temps were above the freezing mark I find the cold harsher now and it was a bit too cold for me to be sitting at a picnic table.

Now it was not as bad as the above but it sure felt like it so…

So my Plan “B” was to just operate from the shack and give out contacts….

So starting on Saturday (0000hrs utc) I started spinning the dial and giving out contacts to whoever I could hear in whatever contest/event they were participating in. Contacts were made in the following contests/event:

POTA Support Your Parks, Ontario QSO Party, Michigan QSO Party, Nebraska QSO Party and the Quebec QSO Party. A few Special Event Stations were also in the log as well.

All the contacts were given a 5/9 ON exchange with the Ontario QP Participants getting a “5/9 FRO (Frontenac County)”.

I managed to give out 40 OQP exchanges .

The POTA activators were really busy and I found (in some cases) hard to break the pileups. That part of our hobby is growing in leaps and bounds. I hope that some of the newer operators were not discouraged by the sheer numbers of stations calling.

According to my records I managed to raise my Unique Parks worked count to 2565 logged. Slowly heading towards the 3000 mark which is my next goal.

With the promises (would the Weather Person lie to me?) of better (warmer/dryer) weather in the next week I am still planning to give the Portable station’s new 17 1/2 foot vertical a testing out from the field. Don’t know which day (yet) as the band conditions have to cooperate along with a bit warmer weather from “Mother Nature”

Hope to get you in the log soon

73bob

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