Fun Back to Back Activation Evening along the Tennessee River - testing out our new key!
Posted by n4bky 25 days ago
The Friday before a holiday weekend is a bonus leave early day for me at work, so why not head to a park and POTA. After a rough weather week filled with tornadoes, today was absolutely beautiful. Wheeler Wildlife Refuge didn't disappoint as always and we were able to find a new spot along the river to activate. We had planned to use our new to us Reliance EFHW that we have been working on with Matt from Reliance Antennas, but we forgot our POTA20 mast and didn't want to just hang it on a brach for our first attempt using something new .... but as always, we've got something else to use. We ended up on the 17' whip antenna with a ground spike and radials set up just beside the river bank and it worked perfectly. We were using the CFT1 and I was using our newly designed 3D printed key, the Duo Straight Key One. I had activated on it once before, but this time used the Navy Knob variation which I really liked. How fun to get on the air with something we designed and built ourselves. We did record this one for our channel so stay tuned and if I made contact with you, I'll email when it posts! In the meantime you can have a look at the contact map and some pictures of our activation, which might look familiar if you read the post just before this from Mike LOL :-) Thank you so much for hunting and following our adventure. Feel free to log in and post any of yours! 73 Becky Trip Report POTA Activation Report ===================== Operator: N4BKY Park Reference: US-0161 Start Time (UTC): Fri, 23 May 2025 22:46:36 UTC End Time (UTC): Fri, 23 May 2025 23:36:20 UTC Duration: 0h 49m Time to Activate: 14m 48s Total QSOs: 30 Number of States: 20 Number of Countries: 3 Contacts List: 1. NN3D - Chris - PA - 767 mi 2. WA2SPL - Joe - VT - 1024 mi 3. WB0L - Jay - MN - 789 mi 4. N0MRK - Mark - CO - 1065 mi 5. VA3UZ - Allan - ON - 645 mi 6. N2EI - Thomas - NJ - 764 mi 7. VA3UZ - Allan - ON - 645 mi 8. KZ2O - Frederick - NY - 729 mi 9. K5OHY - Tim - TX - 893 mi 10. AB0BM - Gary - IA - 729 mi 11. K0BUF - Chris - PA - 735 mi 12. W2UD - Anthony - NJ - 820 mi 13. KG4EXY - John - VA - 602 mi 14. WM2V - Jerry - AZ - 1397 mi 15. N3RC - Roger - CA - 1996 mi 16. W8AJF - Daniel - OH - 542 mi 17. KE8PTX - Mike - MI - 621 mi 18. K2MMT - Chris - CA - 1671 mi 19. W6CSN - Matthew - CA - 1981 mi 20. WK1V - Des - NH - 1007 mi 21. KO4JPR - DJ - VA - 596 mi 22. AA0GP - Tom - SD - 754 mi 23. K7EA - William - UT - 1422 mi 24. NA4A - Ian - AL - 15 mi 25. NN3E - Kevin - MD - 654 mi 26. N0ANE - Michael - MN - 770 mi 27. XE1UYS - Alejandro - VE - 1178 mi 28. KC0ZPS - Ron - CO - 1054 mi 29. KC3IEU - Adam - VA - 612 mi 30. W3ZRW - Joel - MD - 633 mi