Ever since our first Brownsea Island activation I’ve been thinking of ticking off other nearby parks that are still sat unactivated. A recent update added pretty much every scrap of green space in Christchurch, but all of those were quickly snapped up. A weird outlier nearby, though, is GB-0093 Dorset Heathlands - Holton Heath (inc Wareham Meadows RSPB) National Nature Reserve (or “Holton Heath” to its friends, and also GFF-0314 on WWFF). Such a low-numbered park must have been in the system since the start, so it was a surprise to me that no-one had ever attempted it.

Well of course, I had to fix that.

Today’s activation was brought to you by the colour brown.

Not all of this site is accessible to the public. The section that is can be entered by two gates, one on the main road opposite Sandford Middle School, and the other on Station Road. The council provide this helpful map. I picked the Station Road end, and after entering through the gate and crossing over a small bridge, I was into the heathland proper.

Now every time I head out to a park, I think it’ll be the first one that’s so uneventful that I won’t bother blogging about it. This looked like a strong contender, until I took a right turn out onto the wilder part of the heath, and saw this thing.

The remains of the WW2 gun emplacement on Holton Heath

The eastern part of the heath was once part of the Royal Navy Cordite Factory, the rest of which is now Holton Heath Industrial Estate, and this tall gun emplacement was set up to protect it against attack from the south.

I rapidly ruled out any chance of climbing it, although someone must have done so to place the flag not too many years ago. I wandered down to the lake in case there were any more interesting spots to set up down there, but finding none, I headed back to the wooden bench I’d found near to the gun emplacement. It was going to be another luxury POTA experience—I had somewhere to put the radio that wasn’t my own knees!

Not pictured: The furze bush right behind me, home to 1,000 mosquitoes.

As usual, I kicked off on the 20m band, the pile-up started and I netted 30 or so contacts in quick succession.

Now I find that when I’m “in the zone” and the contacts are coming thick and fast, I don’t really have time to think—it’s just greeting, signal report, log, 73, next. So it wasn’t until I was reviewing my log at home that I spotted an unusual callsign that I had thought at the time was Poland…

Wait, that’s Indonesia!

That’s (by far) my new SSB distance record at 12377km.

As usual I switched to 10m after the pile-up died off, but it just wasn’t working for me today. I called CQ for around 15 minutes and self-spotted for POTA & WWFF, but got only a single QSO in the log. I had a go at hunting some park-to-parks on 10m which were also a wash-out; I just wasn’t getting out today although I could hear plenty of other stations.

The JPC-12 antenna set up for 20 metres

With only 33 in the log, and needing 44 for a successful WWFF activation, I switched back to the 20m band and called again, grabbing another 18 callers for a total of 55 today.

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