Week 7

I've been staying on track pretty well. I have made at least 52 contacts each week for a total of seven weeks, and I have not yet missed a single week of making contacts, even if they are mostly FT4 or FT8. Each day and week, I feel I am getting better at making contacts, and I hope to keep this momentum.

Notable or Interesting Contacts

I didn't really have anything that really stood out to me this week as far as contacts go, but I did notice that I got a contact with Japan, and I didn't even notice until I went in and reviewed my contacts for this write-up. I know moving forward, the long-distance contacts are going to become more difficult as the solar cycle changes, or at least that's what people keep saying, but it is amazing to me that I made contact 5,500+ miles away, and it didn't really stand out to me. That's wild. I'm sure this was just because it is mostly FT8 and FT4, which don't have the same level of excitement as a voice contact.

POTA Activations

Here is our setup at Boysen State Park overlooking a beach about the frozen lake.

This weekend, I went with my family to Boysen State Park (US-3293), and we checked out some campsites we hope to reserve for camping this year. We purchased a tent and set it up. I went ahead and operated from the car, and my kids and spouse were chilling out in the tent. For whatever reason, 20M was really busy, and I couldn't break through the pileups to make contacts on 20M, so I figured I would check out 15M, and I was able to make a decent number of contacts.  I made 9 separate P2P contacts, including two to two-fer parks.

One interesting thing was that I came across a park in UT (one of the states I need for my QRZ 50 States Award). I got him tuned in, he called last contact, and I missed him. Then, as he was saying, he was going to move to another park and activate a new park, he accepted one more P2P. Then it was weird, people were calling into the frequency because it was listed on the POTA spots, but no one was calling CQ or QRZ. Then someone started calling CQ and holding the frequency. He was also doing POTA, so I made a contact. He eventually left, but not before handing the frequency over to another park to hold it, so I called him as well. The cool thing was that I was able to connect with 3 operators at four different references.

Totals

Here are the current week's total and the running totals for the entire project.