During our family vacay to Mackinaw Island, I found some time to sneak away and get some POTA in right next to our hotel at Straits State Harbor. This is a cool little harbor located in Mackinac City. I stopped at 50 contacts. Lots of park-to-park contacts. Here is my contact map:
I’m not sure what they do at this harbor. I think locals use this as a boat access to Lake Huron. I did see a few people fishing from the pier, but I did not see anyone catch anything.
This is about as good as it gets to get a new park right next to your hotel.
I got 2024 off to a great start by activating Bald Mountain State Recreation Area, K-3383. I really hope to do more POTA activations this year. That should be my New Year’s resolution. I got a nice 58 in the log, coast-to-coast and two in Spain!
During our family vacation to Gatlinburg, TN, I decided to activate Seven Islands Birding State Park. It was fairly close to our hotel in Sevierville … at least it seemed close on the map. Due to traffic in the area, travel time to the park was 30 minutes, despite the park being about 16 miles away from the hotel.
The park is very nice. I was able to find a spot to set up my Wolf River Coil antenna near the parking lot. Initially, I had some trouble tuning my antenna. I think the issue was with the radials I created before I left for vacation. I was using 6 radials cut to 33′. When I got back to my hotel, it appears the new radials I cut are about a foot shorter than the stock radials. When I switched back to 6 radials cut to the same size as the stock WRC radials, the antenna tuned no problem. This is something I will have to look at when I get back home. The stock length radials tuned to about 1:1.3 SWR – not too shabby.
40 meters was not cooperating too well. I got 11 contacts on 40. I moved over to 20 meters and picked up a quick 8 additional contacts, including one park to park. I had a total of 19 contacts over approximately 40 minutes on the air.
