My Mobile Station 
350 Miles that day
Ohio has 75 (soon to be 76) State Parks, but did you know that there are 271 POTA “references” in Ohio? I’ve activated 169 of them. My goal is to activate the remaining 102 references in Ohio before the moratorium on adding new parks ends.
I’ve done a couple day trips, picking up a park here or there, but I’ve run out of new parks within easy driving distance. So, it was time for a day trip to hit multiple parks.
So after Christmas, I planned a 350 Mile road trip to the Logan/Lancaster area to hit 7 references (1 State Wildlife area, and 6 State Nature Preserves). Using FT8 & CW, I made almost 120 contacts on that trip. There was one stretch of road in Fairfield County that was still snow covered, and required 4WD. But, most roads were open and dry.
While setting up at Rockbridge State Nature Preserve in Logan, John (AF8E) stopped by to say Hi. John lives in the area, and sometimes we will meet at a local park to chat, and catch up. We talked for a bit, then he moved on to another park. I finished my 10 contacts there, and headed on to Christmas Rocks State Nature Preserve, where I found Nathan, N8NI waiting for me. Nathan works all over the state, and has activated about the same number of parks as me. So, we get together whenever we can to trade activation stories. We’d been wanting to get a picture of our “almost” identical license plates side by side, and this was a great opportunity to do so.
My last activation of the day at Shallenberger State Nature Preserve in Lancaster. The light was starting to fade, so I headed east, arriving home around 8 PM.
My gear this time around was the usual FT-891, running the mobile antenna. Power was delivered by 2 LiFePo4 batteries. I drained the 12 AH battery just after lunchtime, and switched over to the 20AH, which got me through the rest of the afternoon. I brought spare antennas as well. There’s nothing worse than having a failure with no backup when you’re far from home.
That’s it for now. 73 all DE WG8X