Well it has been a while since my last POTA activation, but while on a family vacation we stayed at Charlestown State park in Indiana. The park is designed as US-2253. We were there only two nights, so after a trip into Louisville in the morning/early afternoon when we returned I decided to to try and activate the park, even with the sweltering 98 degree temperatures.

for this activation I used my Xeigu G90 HF radio, and for an antenna I used an end fed half wave antenna. Since I still am working on my CW (slowly getting there) I operated SSB. Stringing up the wire antenna was made quickly using an arborist rope and weight. I managed to get over a branch at a decent height on my first tray, and pu;;ed the wire up. The configuration ended up taking the shape of an inverted V with the wire attaching to the 49:1 UnUn placed adjacent to the transceiver. My operating position was on a picnic table close to the tree. Power to the radio was via a DC-DC converter with one of my Milwaukee M18 too batteries as a supply.

after a quick check to see if everything was working I chose to run 40M. No special reason why, the antenna tunes up on 10-40m, but when I powered on the radio 40m was already selected and I quickly spin of the knob revealed several stations so I said why not.

I self spotted on the pota.app site around 21;42 UTC and started calling CQ. Within minutes I began to hear the familiar sounds of people tuning up on/near my frequency and had my first contact at 2144. I had 8 total contacts in 5 minutes so was very optimistic on a successful activation. 10 more were in the log by 22:01, with 14 contacts in the log at this point I was happy I decided to activate. I complied my 24th contact by 22:09, and at this point with the heat I decided to call it a day.

Below is a map of the contacts location. For logging I used HamRS and it provides this map on the fly.

Thanks to everyone that hunted me, and hopefully I will do this more often, hopefully in much cooler weather!

73,
K2LRV