Thomas Does Radio or Something

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!

With all the prep done over in the other post and acceptable weather, of course I had to actually take on the adventure. My drive out to K-1441 Blue Mound State Park ( wiki ) was a little on the late side. Stopping in Verona on the way over to acquire some fast food to maintain energy through the event also put me a bit further behind schedule. Soon enough, I arrived at the middle altitude parking lot of the park to hike the rest of the way to summit W9/WI-010 all in Iowa county. Only a bit into the 1800Z March 13th start, but there's still setup and making contacts to happen. View up the trail from just above the parking lot to reach the East Tower on the summit

It's already the start of the UTC day for the Wisconsin QSO Party (March 13, 2022 - 1800Z to 0100Z March 14) and my plans are kinda in place. With proven antenna capabilities on 40m and 20m (blog post of that POTA activation still in the backlog) that should probably also give me 15m with more tuner help, plus 6/2/70 FM capability, that should give me enough to work with. Since there's a perfectly reasonable time constraint on the contest, planning to operate portable for the whole thing is probably within my capabilities. So, what's the plan? Destination: K-1441 Blue Mound State Park ( wiki ) containing summit W9/WI-010 . Summit summary from sotl.as, map content from Open Street Map contributors