POTA After-Action: US-6356 on 15Jun2025
I always love reading K4SWL's "after-action reports" (example) and so I thought I'd write one of my own!
Today I completed my 4th successful Parks on the Air activation at US-6356 Keystone Wildlife Management Area, with Logan KJ5EDE as a two-operator activation.
At first, we wanted to attempt US-2788 Keystone State Park, but it was closed off due to heavy rains recently - and so we embarked on an adventure to another area and found a nice spot at the nearby WMA to setup. For my own gear, I brought along my Yaesu FT-450 and 15Ah Bioenno LiFePO battery. We initially tried to get on the air with the FT-450, but I seem to have lost the hand mic for it and the backup we attempted wasn't outputting any audio!1
So in the end, we were using Logan's FT-891, a Buddipole tuned for 14.200MHz, and parked on 14.220MHz to call CQ.
In the span of ~30 minutes, we made 24 QSOs - 2 park-to-park QSOs, 13 US states, and 3 Canadian provinces. Band conditions weren't the best, but they were certainly better than they have been in recent days - we got lucky with quite a low noise floor!
After the activation, we drove by Keystone Dam and got some cool photos with all the floodgates opened.
I had a great time, and today's operation made me a bit more confident to go do Parks on the Air on my own - and also gave me some good insight into improving my setup. I now need to go replace that hand mic, and hopefully I can go attempt some more QSOs with the FT-450D.
I don't suspect many of them will see this, but if I got you in the log - thanks for hunting!
73, WW0CJ
After some testing, it seems the mic works but my radio doesn't want to play nice with it. I'm really crossing my fingers that it's just a bad setting or something, and not an issue with the mic connector or the radio's internals. I'll have to buy a new mic for the kit and then do some testing, but 🤞🏻↩