My First Activation at Honey Creek State Park

I had a quick opportunity to activate Honey Creek State Park (US-2768) for my first time earlier this week. My wife and I had some day plans to visit Missouri without our kids and I planned short activation along the way. We stopped at Honey Creek State Park in Grove, Oklahoma at around 10:30 in the morning. It cost me $8.00 for the parking permit (I should probably buy the annual pass again!) and there were some somewhat clean bathrooms available. The park seemed relatively full, but there weren’t many people out and about on a Tuesday morning.

I deployed my 7.2 meter fishing pole with my homemade linked dipole near the pavilion. It was fairly windy and my pole blew over while I was getting it setup. I realized I needed to anchor my support poles (electric fence posts) a little better in the rocky ground. Once it was up, I pulled the coax over to the picnic area. I tried to get a spot in the sun because it was a little cool. Unfortunately almost the entire area was shaded.

I started on 40-meters first to try to get some local contacts. Since I had the activation scheduled, I was spotted by RBN and my spot automatically posted to the POTA spots page. 40-meters was very slow! It took several minutes to get my first contact. I ended up with three QSOs (and one busted callsign – sorry!) on 40-meters.

I switched to 20-meters after about 30 minutes. 20-meters was working a lot better. I ended up with 10 more QSOs in the log before I had to call QRT. I was really happy to get my fellow CWA Academy classmate Norm (WA1NLG) in the log! In total I had 13 good QSOs with almost everyone to the east of my location.

I created a Python script to generate the QSO map. Caller locations were pulled from an online API and may not be 100% accurate. I need to clean up the script before I can share it. My next planned activation will probably be at Pine Creek WMA where we will be camping to view the solar eclipse.