Emboldened by my success at the local beach running 20-meter SSB from my truck, I figured that I would give a NPOTA Activation a try. So last night I registered a two hour long activation of NM22, Roger Williams National Memorial Park, starting at 17:00 UTC today.
RI is a small state to begin with, and there aren’t as many opportunities for NPOTA Activations as in other areas, but at least with the exception of Touro, they are easy to activate and close-by. Some checking indicated that NM22 had been activated 13 times before with about 1,170 QSOs total, so I knew there would be folks looking for it.
I pulled into the park at about 16:45 UTC, and found a parking spot away from trees and other things that might detune my antenna.
I was on the air around 14.265 MHz by 16:56 UTC and continued to work stations until 19:13 UTC. After 140 on-air minutes I had worked 110 stations, in 35 different states (oddly enough zero DX). The band conditions were not great. At times you could literally hear the bottom of the band drop out, but 3-5 minutes later signals would be back. So there was lots of QSB and QRM to deal with.
Conditions were actually a bit better than yesterday.
And it was a good thing I mostly spotted myself, but there were several other nice Ops who spotted me as well:
