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 a day back to the grind for me, so now we’ll start really testing out if I can manage to get a contact in every day. Luckily I work from home, so I can pretty much have the rig on most of the day, while keeping the spotter up on one of my monitors. As long as I’m not in a meeting, it’s fairly easy to throw my call out into the pile-ups while I’m working on other things. As luck would have it, I was able to get my first park of the day with David, N2SMJ, activating K-2045
An interesting note with this contact - shortly after I worked him, someone called out that they had a net scheduled in a few mintues on frequency. David was the perfect example of a polite operator and wrapped up one more contact (a park to park actaully), and then told the net station that he’d QSY (Change frequencies if you’re new to the game.) The thing I found intersting is that the ‘pileup’ wasn’t nearly as polite - after he said he was going to QSY desperate hunters continued to call for him, hoping he’d sneak them in. It was a little sad to hear, because while much is made of activators needing to be polite operators, as hunters we need to remember that that same applies to us. My recomendation is that if someone says QRT, or that they are going to QSY, allow them to do so, and try catching them another day, or looking for them on their new frequency.