Thomas Does Radio or Something

Last weekend was Winter Field Day 2023 and I caught the tail end of it to combine with some Parks on the Air at my favorite Governor Nelson State Park ( K-1452 , wiki ). Seven inches of fresh powder awaited between me and the shelter I activated from (and, of course, on the car before I left). Operating position looking across Lake Mendota to downtown Madison including the capitol

One of my objectives for the good weather in Maine during my holiday travel was to get out to the convenient and interesting parks in the area. As highlighted by W1DED 's map documenting POTA MAINE , there are a couple of Midcoast Maine parks that had no activations ever by 2022: both the Durham State Forest and Ducktrap River Wildlife Management Area. The reason? They're poorly documented locations with no convenient drive-up-and-know-you're-there place. The WMA even overlaps the local Ducktrap Preserve, but you'd have to figure out what that meant and where to hike. And the forest, well, the forest barely even seems to exist on the internet by that name! No official state information and just lots of OpenStreetMap references. I looked to take on the forest to understand where it was, what the access looked like, and then get out there and put the park on the air.

The weather turned out decently enough for the summer/plaque edition of Support Your Parks by POTA . And I've left this blog draft languishing since last September! Not that I've even gotten the Spring 2022 blog out... Anyway, I spent some time out and activated K-1452 and K-4250 to get on the list. Here are some pictures.

My holiday travel for the 2022-23 season was nice and complicated this year, but also gave me the opportunities for additional radio adventures! My feet-on-ground (outside of airports) sequence for this was: WI-IL-IN-OH-KY-ME-MA-NH-WI. Through that, I managed to escape major storm-related travel delays and generally have abnormally nice weather throughout. I ended up with hundreds of portable QSOs across 13 park entities and 3 summits, plus nearly a hundred QSOs at my parents' QTH. So, on to the summary!

I wanted a set of paddles to bring with me while traveling for the holidays at the end of this year and the vintage Vibroplex Standard I've got in the apartment didn't seem like a good travel option. Thinking about what would be a decent starting point that would be more sophisticated (and, hopefully, consistent) than trying to use binder clips or improvised levers, I figured some SPDT relay contacts might not be too bad. Hence, the first attempt: Fully assembled and cabled resulting key