W1CLT, W4NEM, and myself W4THM activated the park under special event call Whiskey 4 Alligator. That I’m aware of, we’re the first ham radio activity at the location ever since it got renamed and repurposed.
We honestly expected much worse than what we ran into. There was QRM from the power lines but it wasn’t horrible. There were mosquitoes but they were not as bad as we expected. There were film crews and folks on both sides of the fence ideologically but people were minding their own business. There was no protesting. Traffic slowed as it passed by the entrance to the site. Seems everyone (including us) had to take a picture of the sign.
Station wise, we ran 20m SSB in W1CLT’s mobile using a hood mounted antenna. W4NEM ran 10m-17m SSB from his mobile using a tripod mounted antenna. I was there for emotional support.
In under 2hrs we setup and made 25 contacts on 20m, and 2 on 15m. 20m contacts were as far as Arizona. We had one contact out of New Mexico that was running 5w. Pretty Amazing! A fair amount of our contacts were Park to Park which was very cool.
Gotta say I expected we’d get QRM’d to death by those who preach free speech but only when they agree with it. No such thing happened. We had some stations much friendlier than others but overall, no QRM, no hangers, no tuning on us, etc. Some folks even thanked us for activating the location.
“POTA, Field Day on your terms”
