After completing 30 unique park activations yesterday, my “Gold Activator” certificate arrived today:
I continue to gather metrics on activations. I noted in doing three activations yesterday that my old Toughbook CF-30 laptop had used 30% of it’s battery capacity, indicating I could have done 6 to 8 parks on a single charge. In addition all three activations took 5.7 AH from my LiFePO4 battery. The QSO rate was close to one a minute in all three parks, and I was on the air for about 30 minutes at each park. While doing three parks in a row was fun, I’m fairly certain that doing four would have lowered the “fun” factor significantly. In the future I’ll try to do 2 or 3 activations in a day.
The POTA group keeps track of Activation and Hunting activities with a Leaderboard. You can look at it two ways, either by year, or overall. I noted that I am in the top 10% of activators both overall and for 2021. That just says it is fairly easy to make a significant impact even though there are thousands of people participating (9,586 as of today, making 2.3 million contacts)
