Here’s what’s happening - in 2021, two operators (N5HA, Kenneth Bailey & W9AV, Clint Sprott) managed to work at least 1 park every day. My goal for 2022 is to do the same by hunting at least 1 park every UTC day, and secondarily, to try and write a short post about the day’s first contact. If you want to play along, feel free - I’ll be sharing updates about it during the monthly POTA updates that I prepare for the various ham radio media outlets.
now that you’re in the know about the Baily-Sprott Challenge, here’s the scoop for today:
Bailey-Sprott Challenge Update
Ahh - Saturday morning. A wonderful time to sleep in, and wake up slow. Unless you have kids - then you’re basically at the mercy of waking up at whatever hour they start bouncing around the house in the morning :-) Luckily I’m okay as a morning person, son when the kids want to be up early, I can usually head with them down to the basement and wander into my shack while they play in the main room (but just as often they follow me into the shack.) Luckily for me, there were a couple stations out for an early start to keep me and my helpers busy. The first contact I made, I must have copied the call wrong, because when I went to look it up on the POTA site later in the day, it didn’t bring anything up. Now, since I’m one of the POTA admin, I guess I could manually pull up the spots database and see who was getting spotted at the park I wrote down at the time I wrote down, BUT that would feel a bit like cheating since the general public can’t do the same. Busted calls are sometimes just part of what happens in ham radio, so I’ll have to do like everyone else and just wait it out to see what shows up.
Luckily, I made several contacts today, so my ‘second’ contact, which is the first one I made today that actaully brings something up on the POTA site, was Walter, K5LD who was out activating K-8375.
As a fun note, one of my contacts later in the day was N6NRD/VE3, who is getting up and running as a new volunteer with POTA. You’ll likely hear more from/about him, and about the projects that that he’ll be getting involved with as we keep chugging along.