I am working on my Kilo Award at K-4646. The area where I parked was not conducive to my Chameleon in the vertical configuration, so I decided to activate drive-by style. I did not use my Chameleon today. I used my 213′ telescoping whip with my tri-magnet mount on 20, 17, and 15 meters. The whip is a 1/4 wave fully extended and only needed to be retracted to achieve resonance on 17 and 15. The bands were alive today, so making contacts was not the problem. The problem was an angry cow that happened upon me as I was trimming the whip to 17 meters. It snorted and pawed the ground with one of its front legs. I got into my car for protection. It starred at me for a few minutes before launching two false charges towards my car. Eventually it lost interest and walked down the road and into the woods. I do not know whether it is a feral cow or the property of a rancher. Either way it was not a fan of POTA activating.
When I finally got around to activating I made my first contact at 15:30 UTC on 18.075 CW with K8RAT. I made my last contact at 18:10 UTC on 14.308 SSB with KD9ADB. In between I managed a total of 190 contacts with 40 on CW and 150 SSB. 122 contacts were on 17 meters, 38 on 15 meters, and 30 on 20 meters. It was good to see 15 meters open! I had 21 DX contacts and 8 park-to-parks. Countries worked were Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, Luxembourg, Poland, the Azores, Italy, Slovakia, Venezuela, Honduras, Puerto Rico, and Martinique.
I had one run of 72 QSOs beginning with NI4LO at 16:14 UTC to AB6QM at 16:58 UTC without having to call CQ once. That was a busy pile up.
Radio Free Florida: K4NYM 