npotathon success

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     So, as I start typing this, I honestly have no idea where to start.  I don't want to bore everyone with a giant, miles long post (although that would be fitting with my miles long trip...), but I feel like I'm bursting at the seams with NPOTA excitement after my marathon of NPOTA activations.  I think this is going to be the game plan - this post will be a summary post, and maybe later on I'll do a couple follow up posts, as needed.  One I have in mind is a "lessons learned" post for others that want to do a marathon like this, or for others that just want to activate some of the same parks.  

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     So, to start, my goal was to activate 12 parks in a single day.  Ambitious, yes. Impossible, not at all!  Thanks to all the chasers out there, I was able to hand out contacts in all 12 parks on my list, but I only had enough contacts at 10 of them to "count."  So even though I didn't quite hit my goal, I still set a new bar - 10 parks in 1 day!  Firstly, here are the parks where I handed out contacts, but didn't get credit.  I uploaded the logs so these chasers would at least get credit for these parks, and I also counted these "points" towards my own scoring (details at the end of this post!):

• Gettysburg National Military Park
• Catoctin Mountain Park

     I think the lesson with Gettysburg was that, while Hams will often stay up late at night playing radio, getting them to wake up early is another story - One of my few contacts at Gettysburg was a west coast ham, that I suspect was actually staying up late, instead of getting up early :-)
     Catoctin Mountain Park was just a bad choice of location on my part.  I would have liked to blame the residents of the park (wait...does someone live there?  I hear they have a camp....) for interfering with my transmissions. In reality though, the spot I stopped, while convenient for my drive, was in a literal hole, and I was blasting all my RF into the dirt....oh well! 

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     Anyway, enough of this negative stuff - Here's the good news:

I activated 10 Parks in 1 Day!!!

     In no particular order (oh wait, they are in order - the order in which I activated them!) here are the 10 Parks I activated on August 1st, 2016:

• Eisenhower National Historic Site
• Antietam National Battlefield
• Harpers Ferry National Historic Park
• Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Historic Park
• Blue Ridge Parkway
• Shenandoah National Park
• Appalachian National Scenic Trail
• Bluestone National Scenic River
• New River Gorge National River
• Gauley River National Recreation Area

     Many of these contacts consisted of getting in and out, and operating from my mobile, but here are some highlights I'd like to point out:

     Eisenhower is a relatively rare unit, because it doesn't have much public access.  It's actually managed by the Gettysburg folks, and visitors have to be bussed in from the Gettysburg lot.  I filled out a special use permit to make sure I'd be good to go, but if you contact me I can fill you in on a sneaky (maybe not-so-sneaky) place you can activate from, where you would be out of the way, and wouldn't draw attention if you just operated from your car :-)

     The next notable activation, was my "twofer" at Shenandoah and Appalachian Trail.  The main reason this one stood out, was because I had to get out of my car.  Trails have some special NPOTA rules - reached under human power, within 100' of the trail, and no part of the station can be connected to the car.  So, the first hurdle, was choosing the location.  Luckily there is pull-off right at the start of Skyline Drive (Shenandoah Park's Scenic Road), that also happens to have the Appalachian Trail going right through the middle of it!  This means that I could jump out of the car, grab my case of stuff, and meet all the requirements with just a few footsteps!

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Pelican Storm Case iM2875 Large Storage Box with Cubed Foam IM2875-00001

     After this activation, I had my longest "between parks" drive - Luckily I had the most recent episode (Episode 56) of the 100 Watts and a Wire Podcast to keep me company for part of the ride.  They recently started doing news segments from Amateure Radio Newsline (ARN), and it was a blast hearing the story ARN did about my activation, while I was doing my activation!

     The next couple parks were Rivers, which also have an interesting twist - the requirement to be within 100' of the water.  To prove I satisfied that, I traveled with this guy:

Stanley 34-790 100-Foot Open Reel Fiberglass Long Tape Rule

     Using this let me get some photographic evidence that I was close enough to the river.  As a note here, let me know if you want to know the GPS locations of these spots I found.  I found them by studying google maps before I went, but it took me quite a while - I'm willing to share so you don't have to do the same thing!  Just be warned that it is a single lane, bumpy, rocky, unpaved, bottom of the car scraping drive to one of them....

Ready for Some Stats?

     So here's what all the chasers have been waiting for (okay, so maybe not really waiting, but I bet they're at least curious)...who contacted me at the most parks?  Here are some stats - Out of 213 total contacts, I logged 142 different chasers.  The top chasers where:

• K1RO - Mark - 7 parks
• W2NO - Dan - 7 parks
• K2GAV - Theodore - 6 parks
• KG8P - Thomas - 5 parks
• KT1K - Robert - 5 parks
• W1CX - Caid - 5 parks
• W9JA - Richard - 5 parks
• KR0P - John - 4 parks
• K1KA - David - 3 parks
• KC1CBQ - Gary - 3 parks
• KD4ADC - John - 3 parks
• N4CC - Gregory - 3 parks
• WB2QJ - Mark - 3 parks

     Thanks to the chasers listed above, and the 129 others that contacted me that day, I honestly feel like I can say NPOTAthon was a big success!