Date: July 26 2021
Park : K-1525 Muskegon State Park

After my first POTA activation, I decided to give another park a try! I had to decide between activating the same park again, or going to a new park. I saw that there was another park nearby, called Muskegon State Park and it was only 10 minutes further away.

Since I wasn’t aware of how this park was arranged, I had to do a little exploring, and discovered it was really a hidden gem. There is tons of parking, beach space, and felt pretty quiet everywhere I explored. I did notice that there was an old lookout fort that was up on a hill. I decided to use a small parking lot near there, as there was shade, picnic benches, and no one else in the parking area.

My Gear for this adventure :
Radio : Xiegu G90
Audio Interface: DigiRig Mobile
Antenna : Buddistick Pro

I had planned to activate the park with FT8 again, but it was apparently not meant to be! As I was setting up the station, I discovered that the CAT side of the DigiRig audio-interface had somehow broken since I last used it! (DigiRig was awesome and replaced it with great ease) I wasn’t emotionally prepared for that. I tried to setup VOX on the G90, to handle the PTT side of things, but just couldn’t get it going in the field. I wasted a fair bit of time on that, but eventually gave up.

I came to the realization I needed to give-up or switch to SSB. Having not done much SSB on HF, this was more daunting than it would be today. I was able to launch HAMRS, spot myself on the POTA site, and start making contacts. In the end, I made 13 QSOs before packing up to head home. There was a lot of noise on the bands that day, and I ended up having to move around a lot. Thankfully, the hunters followed me and I was able to make it successful!