From my regular childhood haunts, to this place—despite being in my home town, I don’t think I have ever been here before. This is Ham Common, POTA ref. GB-1302, an area of heathland with a large fishing lake and two look-out points to enjoy scenic views of Poole Harbour.

And who wouldn't?

It’s also possibly the most inconvenient place to get to in the whole of Poole, found by driving down the backstreets of backstreets in Hamworthy, and pinned between Rockley holiday park and the Royal Marines base, the latter of which Google Maps thinks it can route people through. I’m sure the base commander is ecstatic about this.

In the higher sections of the common near the western end, close to the car park, there are a few wide open grassy areas with plenty of space for antennas. So of course I ignored them completely, slipped and slid through fifty metres of sludgy wet clay along the lake, found the most inhospitable place to site an antenna, and activated with my boots in a puddle. Why?

That’s why.

Coots and gulls drifted around, in and out of the reeds, the sun shone down in a bright blue sky, and despite the muddy boots I couldn’t imagine a nicer January day than this.

After a while, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that I would have to break the calm and get on the radio.

This would be my 20th activation as far as the POTA system is concerned, though a few of those must be 2-fers because I make this my 17th. It was the last sunny day before the weekend storm hit, and the last free day of my Christmas holiday before I would have to come crashing back to reality on Monday morning. Time to get cracking.

Hunting on 20 metres produced a couple of park-to-parks and a park-to-summit, but I think a lot of Europeans must have been back to work already as there weren’t that many activators out. As usual, I followed this up with a CQ call, a self-spot, and a pile-up of 51 more QSOs including several more park-to-parks and a couple of Canadian stations.

Let’s see if the Americans are awake.

After success on 20 it was time to give 10 a try, though mostly what it gave me was trouble. My normal measurements for 10 metres on the JPC-12 vertical netted me an SWR over 3:1 and a radio that refused to chuck more than 20 Watts into it. I’m not entirely sure of the cause; there seems to be no damage to the antenna and I could eventually tune up a little better by shortening the whip quite a bit. Perhaps setting up on completely saturated clay soil and less than a metre above the waterline was causing some coupling between my radials and an unusually conductive ground.

While running back and forth between radio and antenna to re-tune, who do I see pop up on the spot list? None other than Joe, KC1SRI who I couldn’t quite make a contact with yesterday. I had let him know on Mastodon that I’d be out at the same time today, and there he was on 10 metres, so this was my shot. Time to drop another transatlantic park-to-park into the pileup!

As expected it took a few minutes to get through and a number of overs to complete the briefest of QSOs, but with a report of 31 from him and 22 from me, we got there in the end. And at 20W from my resolutely difficult antenna, no less!

I also tried a brief QSO with this guy, but couldn’t hear his signal report.

Hunting other park-to-parks on 10m was unsuccessful, as I wasn’t able to receive any of the spotted activators at my station. Calling CQ resulted in two QSOs, one with KK4OMJ from the POTA team in the US, but another ten minutes of CQs resulted in no more takers, and with the sun setting over the hill it was time to pack up and head back home.

Many thanks and Happy New Year to all my contacts this afternoon. See you on the air next time!