Saturday, October 17, 2026, over 10 local Radio Amateur’s and one faithful Labradoodle, K9DOG, gathered at Hope Township’s Woodside Park to help celebrate the Fall Support Your Local Park POTA, Parks On The Air, event.
Even though the weather was a tad brisk, the sun was shining and folks generally had a good time. All told, over 200 Q’s were in the log by the end of the event. There was a mix of home-made antennas ranging from random wires, to an end-fed half wave and one Mombo 150’ Loop. Plus an assortment of verticals and a Magnetic Loop.
All operations were battery-powered and most of the radios were QRP or low power averaging 5 to 10 watts of output. Not that we roughed it too much, you can see one of the fellows brought a propane heater to keep his fingers limber so his Morse code was perfect, and special thanks to James, AA0HP, for providing a coffee pot and some excellent brew! The plans originally called for a bit of grilling, but folks were so focused on operating that the grill never got lit. But not to worry, the Coffee got polished off!
Highlights for this activation were Jack, K8GTG’s QRP phone contact with a station in Georgia, and the four Operators who did a 160–6M POTA Crawl in CW or Morse code.
Special thanks also go out to Wendy, K8SWR, who helped folks with POTA logging software and getting logs published to the POTA website.
In addition to giving Amateur’s a chance to practice emergency deployment operations and test their gear, it was a super chance to work with fellow operators, see different configurations, equipment, and styles. Many questions were asked, most receiving multiple answers and folks got a chance to validate that their equipment would indeed work in time of emergency. Activities wrapped up by 4:00 and folks were off to their next event with the participants all planning to attend the next outing. Thanks again to all who showed up and made this event fun for all.