With one last day of holiday remaining, sunshine and warm temperatures forecast, and four new parks in the local area not yet activated, it was time to get out there!

All four parks had views over parts of Poole Harbour, so I decided to group them all together in a rove. According to my alerts on the POTA site I thought I could get through them all in three hours, but propagation conditions on 20m were awful today, and in the end it was over four hours from start to finish. But that did give me a lot of time to enjoy the beautiful weather!

0900-1000Z: GB-6351 Evening Hill

Evening Hill, as its name suggests, is best at dusk, when you can watch the sun set over Poole Harbour and Brownsea Island. Sadly today’s timing didn’t allow for that, and I hit it up just after 1000 local time, but the scenery doesn’t disappoint at any time of day.

There’s plenty of mown grass here to set up an antenna. For this activation, and all those on today’s rove, I was using the JPC-12 vertical with my Yaesu FT-891 and 20Ah battery.

The activation started slowly, briefly picked up… and then totally fell off. After a signal report of 11 for IK6LMB after many, many retries (thank you for your patience!) there was a full 15 minute gap before my next QSO.

By the time I got over the 10 QSO line for a POTA activation, it was nearly 1100 local time and I was already falling well behind the schedule I had set for myself.

1030-1115Z: GB-6626 Turlin Moor Viewpoint & Nature Reserve

The viewpoint here doesn’t have a lot of space for anything but viewing, but just to the east is an open space plenty big enough for an antenna. Things went a little quicker here, helped by the coffee I picked up on the way, and I made the required 10 QSOs in just under 20 minutes, including my only transatlantic contact of the day with W1OW.

1130-1215Z: GB-6625 Lytchett Bay Nature Reserve

I had every intention of leaving the car in Turlin Moor and walking here, but as I was already half an hour behind my unrealistic schedule, I drove around instead.

The shore here is a five-minute walk through the forest, and has a reasonable amount of space. However, when I arrived there I found a birder intently staring through binoculars, and decided I would leave him be and head back into the forest to find a clearing in which to set up.

Following the pattern, it was another slow activation, taking half an hour to get 10 in the log—a pace I associate more with QRP than with today’s 100W output.

The ground was absolutely crawling with midges, which I’m not sure are in their final flying biting form at this time of year—certainly my ankles remained unscathed. Hopefully many of them will be food for the local birds before summer comes…

The highlight of this park was a Greater Spotted Woodpecker. My first GSWOTA!

1230-1310Z: GB-5975 Holes Bay

Where, really, is the boundary of “Holes Bay Nature Park & Wetland Reserve”? It’s not something with a defining polygon in our (generally great) national geodata sets, so it’s somewhat left up to the imagination. Given that a couple have previous activators did so without being “kayak mobile”, I took the same approach and decided somewhere within 20 metres or so of the high water mark would be close enough.

I was briefly a fan of this spot, being about as far out into Holes Bay as you can get without muddy boots, but unfortunately that spit exists entirely to support the electricity pylon on the far end of it. I’m not going to mess with antennas under power lines, so I eventually settled on the corner of Upton Country Park that overlooks the bay. This also conveniently gave me a fifth POTA park, and therefore another Rover Warthog award endorsement.

I started by making contact with YT3NR, but realised too late that my antenna was nowhere near stable enough in the rising wind. It took three runs back and forth between my operating position and the antenna to put it back upright again; thankfully the other operator was patient enough to let me complete the QSO. In the end, I stuck it into the branches of a tree in order to keep it upright.

Having the antenna itself touching the tree probably wasn’t great for efficiency, but an inefficient antenna upright was definitely an improvement on one lying on the ground!

11 QSOs later, and only an hour behind schedule, I was finally done with today’s rove. All in all, I made 43 contacts across five POTA parks, and most importantly enjoyed four hours out in today’s gorgeous sunshine!

Thanks to my contacts during today’s rove. On the list of POTA parks within 20 miles of home, I have now activated 123, with 7 remaining. But with this rove I’ve passed another milestone: I’m now back to 100% completion of the Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole council area.

See you on the air again next time!