Here’s what’s happening - my goal for 2022 is to hunt at least 1 park every day (UTC day), and secondarily, to try and write a short post about the day’s contact. If you want to play along, feel free - I’ll be sharing updates about it during the monthly POTA updates that I prepare for the various ham-radio media outlets.
now that you’re in the know, here’s the scoop for today:
Today was my last day of vacation/holiday for the Christmas and New Year’s season, so I had plenty of time to linger over coffee and breakfast cleanup this morning while my partner drove the older 2 kiddos to school. After some basic morning chores, I sat down at the radio for a few mintues and was able to snag Bryan, AD8HK. If you’re following along you might notice that yesterday’s first contact was Brian, today was Bryan - I think making contacts with operators with both spellings should be some kind of special mulitplier :-) Bryan was on 40 meters activating K-9437 when I worked him, but he went on to several other parks throughout the day. During the contact just before mine, I heard him say he was shooting for 7 different parks.
Another interesting note - there was a decent amount of POTA dx on this morning - when I sat down there were spots from 6 different entities on the air!
Current Status: 3 for 3.
##In Other News
I’m starting to hear some decent amounts of chatter coming across the new repeater, via the Ham Workbench Node, 55915. I believe they’ve got it tied in to the BAY-NET DMR group, and there are a small number of other nodes, and a couple repeaters, tied into it now as well. I’ve had a couple QSOS on the repeater now - both locally and via Allstar. I had a nice chat with George, KJ6VU yesterday evening, and if you’re familar with AR Newsline, Paul Braun made an appearance on the node as well, via a repeater in his hometown that he linked in through. As I get back to work, I’ll be here in the office/shack most days and will be monitoring it if you want to connect. Even if you just need to check your own node to make sure it’s working, there’s a good chance you’ll catch me if it’s during ‘normal business hours.’
I’ve also started posting notes on some random evenings via Twitter and the POTA Slack group, when I’m working on POTA support tickets, as a sort of ‘open office hours’ for anyone that would want to jump on and ask any POTA support questions they may have. Since those are ‘pop-up’ if you want to join in, either follow me on Twitter, or head over to https://pota.app and click the resources link to join the POTA slack group. You’ll find the notices of the pop-up support sessions in the #potahelp channel.