UPARC in the Park Event – April 2024

On Saturday, April 20th members of UPARC met at Honeymoon Island to host our annual POTA (Parks on the Air) event. We had about 15 members and guests turn out and made over 80 contacts on SSB and FT-8. The team braved very heavy mosquito swarming early on to get setup and was on the air around 8:45 AM.The wind picked up a bit and blew away most of the bugs by 10:00. That and some very compassionate sharing of bug spray by those well prepared individuals helped us get to the task at hand.

This year, thanks to Tom NY4I, we were able to turn in logs which gave credits to both the club callsign W4AFC and each individual operator’s callsign. This enabled individuals to obtain the “Support Your Parks Weekend” certificate from the POTA website for the contacts they made. [Editor’s Note – that is available to anyone running POTA where both the station callsign (W4AFC) and current operator get credit].

We had some guests who were heavily involved in all the activities and got on the air! Julie Yaeger who teaches at Countryside HS and was our contact for the classroom sessions last year was able to make some contacts and learn about the hobby firsthand. Her husband, Tim, also participated and made some contacts. In addition, we had a visitor who saw us from a nearby pavilion and come over to ask what was going on. This was a young man visiting from Colorado on his high school senior trip. We gave him the tour and a lot of contact information for follow-up. Hopefully, we recruited a future HAM there!

Thanks to all who assisted with the event and also to those who participated.

Editor’s Note – You can see the log and details of our contacts here: https://uparc.org/sh5/2024_April_POTA_W4AFC/

You can also see more info about the POTA activity of W4AFC (the club call) here: https://pota.app/#/profile/W4AFC