Yesterday I went down the street, right around the corner from my house to the South Plainfield PAL parking lot.
Where you see the little bus stop icon is just about where I parked, the extreme corner of the parking lot, which is less than 25 feet from Maple Avenue. Maple Avenue is part of the Washington-Rochambeau National Historical Trail, US-4582.
I was today years old when I realized I had great access to a POTA site so close to home! The times I activated it for NPOTA, I travelled into neighboring Scotch Plains. It never occurred to me to work the Trail from the PAL parking lot. Talk about losing sight of the forest for the trees!
In any event, my activation was a failure as one of the BNC connectors on my 4 States tuner wobbled a bit loose. Lousy soldering job by yours truly. I ended up making only 3 contacts before the SWR started to become flaky, sending the QMX into SWR protection mode. Lesson learned - going forward do NOT remove the BNC to UHF adapters from the tuner. Leave them on and don't stress to solder joints!
The good new is that the repair was easier than falling from a log, AND that I now realize I have a convenient POTA setup spot so close to home. Busy day tomorrow, but if the weather is decent next weekend, I'll give it another shot.
72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!
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