A Ham Radio Valentine’s Day

Oddly, WX1MAR and I celebrated Valentine’s Day this year. Odd because, well, in 27 years we have almost never celebrated Valentine’s Day… But! We had a great excuse! I had secured callsign K1S (get it?) for the “Happy Hams Valentine’s Day” special event station. And since February 14th was a Sunday this year, it meant we had a great reason to get on the air and get contacts.

We spent Saturday scouting around south central Massachusetts looking for a perfect operating location. Which also inspired the thought of a future attempt at the Parks-on-the-Air Rapid Deployment Amateur Radio (POTA RaDAR) Lion Award – you’ll have to look that one up yourself! We decided on Whitehall State Park in Hopkinton, Massachusetts (yup, where the Boston Marathon Starts), namely for two reasons: 1) we could operate near our van, 2) we could set up at the Whitehall Reservoir shoreline and theoretically use the frozen lake for a radiofrequency reflecting pool, and 3) it was Parks-on-the-Air (POTA) entity K-2464.

After hoisting both a 40M (oval) off-center fed dipole and 20M (square) half-wave end-fed into the trees, we set up our dualing Yaesu FT-891A transceivers, with autotuners and bandpass filters.

The 30 degree temperature cut our activation down to less than 3 hours. Regardless, WX1MAR still managed to pull out 91 contacts on 20M, while I got 81 on 40M.

So thank you POTA hunters! We will be sending a customized Valentine as a QSL to all of the unique operators involved in our 172 total QSOs. What an amazing day to play radio! Happy Valentine’s Day! 73s & 88s!