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.
Additionally, I can now confirm and share that there were indeed 2 folks that succeeded in doing in 2021, what I’m attempting in 2022. Kenneth Bailey (N5HA) and Clint Sprott (W9AV) both managed to hunt a park every day in 2021, so moving forward through the rest of the year, I’ll be referring to my informal effort to do the same as the ‘Bailey-Sprott Challenge’.
now that you’re in the know, here’s the scoop for today:
This was a busy hump day - In addition to my normal workday, I needed to drop off and pickup the kids from school, and make a stop at the PO box, because of some personal scheduling things, and because the USPS decided to play shuffle the Plaque with YCAR’s plaque from the summer event. (Luckily that got straightened out, and they should finally have it in hand in a couple days.) In addition to that I had an appearance on the Hamradio 2.0 Lunchtime Livestream to talk about POTA’s upcoming Winter Support Your Parks event. Luckily, in spite of the busyness of the day, I got in my first park contact of the day with Billy, KG4SZS while he was at K-3725 in Georgia.
Speaking of Georgia - today must have been an unofficial ‘Georgia on the Air’ day, because for a while this morning it seemed like Georgia accounted for 50% of the active POTA spots :-)
By way of wrapping up, I do want to mention one of my other contacts from today, even though I’ve generally been focusing on my first contact each day in these posts. Several times throughout the morning I came across AD8HK just as he was going QRT and moving to another park (he did several today.) Pertinent to my post yesterday, I had to just be patient and hope to catch him at his next one, which I eventually did mid-afternoon while he was at K-9399.