Springtime POTA
On 11th April 2025 I decided to activate three new parks in my area. Contrary to my usual preferred mode of transportation, I took the car to carry along my heavy but trustworthy Yaesu FT-710. With a K-Index of 3.7 I decided it would be best to bring work with 100 instead of 10W power.
My first park was DE-0999 Latumer Bruch mit Buersbach, Stadtgräben und Wasserwerk Flora and Fauna Reserve which turned out to be crossed by DE-0602 ( Nordrheinische Jakobswege National Historic Trail) at different corners of the park. Finding a suitable location both accessible by car and offering the possibility of a 2fer wasn’t so easy after all. I ended up close to a highway right at the border of the park which produced annyoing QRM on the 40m band.
After a slow start - it was still 10 in the morning - the activation went as smooth as a first activations of a park usually go. It took me one hour to end up with 29 QSOs, many of them with the usual suspects from southen Europe.
Moving on to the next park DE-0998 Ilvericher Altrheinschlinge Flora and Fauna Reserve, which, contrary to the first one, had already been activatd before, I found yet another spot where I could both activate this park and DE-0602 ( Nordrheinische Jakobswege National Historic Trail) at the same time. I found a pictureqse spot on a meadow, just a dozen meters away from the parking ground.
However, just after a few QSOs, my radio turned off right in the middle of a QSO. Lucky enough, the opposite station (LY2BIS) realized that I had issues with my power supply and kept calling me several times after my TRX had turned on again. This didn’t last long; having used my KX-2 for my recent activations, I had stupidly assumed that my two large batteries would still be charged, which of course was not the case. Thus I rushed to the car to get my KX-2 which I had forightedly brought with me. I hurried to plug it into the coax and, alas!, I managed to finish the QSO with LY2BIS, despite powering only 10W as compared to the 100W before. I was even hunted from a few park to park stations and managed to finish the activation with 13 QSOs in just under half an hour.
I packed my things and decided it was time to move on to the third and last of the newly added parks in my area: DE-0097 Rhein-Fischschutzzonen zwischen Emmerich und Bad Honnef Flora and Fauna Reserve. This is an insteresting one since it comprises of many different zones along the shore of the Rhine River which are not connected. I chose one zone just between the cities of Duisburg and Krefeld and did not expect much since I remebered that this is part of town is a highly industrialised area with a harbour and a steel mill nearby. Despite that, I was blown away by the beauty of path leading the spot.
And then, the spot itself was even more magnificent. I set up my KX-2 on a trunk on a beach right at the shore of the Rhine River.
The activation, however, turned out to be rather tedious. With a CME having hit just prior to the activation, it took 40 minutes for 11 QSOs on the 20m band. The 40m band was completely dead for me.