After setting out on my first new satellite activation of a Kansas State Park since 2020, I am back home with two new parks in the bag on my mission to operate satellites from them all. It was an exhausting ~36 hours of overnight Amtrak train rides, a couple hours of driving in a rental car, and battling a stiff wind, but I was able to get two of the three parks activated. This report will cover my first stop, Lake Scott State Park (POTA US-2352) on the outskirts of Scott City, Kansas.
My ride on the westbound Southwest Chief arrived in Garden City, Kansas around 6:00am, leaving me with about two hours until I could pick up my rental car. After walking to a nearby coffee shop, enjoying some breakfast, and changing my clothes from overnight ride in coach, I made my way to the local Hertz to get my car for the day. I was on the road toward Lake Scott State Park by 8:15am or so which got me to the park a little after 9:00am – a full hour before my first planned satellite pass. I took some time scouting out the park for a good operating position given it was surrounded by hills on most sides. In the end, I found an area near the boat ramp which provided me a decent north-south horizon, access to nearby restrooms, and space away from the other guests. It ended up being a very windy morning, and I realized my lack of gloves was going to be an issue with the wind chill.
In any event, I wasted no time getting set up for the 1503z ISS pass. For my FM passes, I was using a new Baofeng K5PLUS radio (affiliate link) which gave me 10W – handy to compete with the craziness of some of this FM passes. Not much to say about this radio at this point other than the 10W is nice, and the USB C port for charging is great for travel! I intend to use this radio as my transmitting radio for my future “lightweight” operations without the FT-817.
I ended up with four contacts on that pass which was positive given its relatively low position in the sky and the busyness. Next was AO-91 at 1529z which was a total bust; despite being long after sunrise, I never heard anything (later checking of AMSAT’s status page confirmed it was not operational). I then tried the new AO-123 at 1537z and scored two more contacts. It was at this point I was starting to get a bit frustrated with the slow-going nature of things.
My initial plans had a JO-97 linear pass next which I figured wouldn’t be very busy, so I didn’t see getting four more contacts on that bird. My original hope was that this JO-97 pass would not be needed, and I could move on to the next park to maximize my chances of activating all three parks that day. In the end, I only made one contact on JO-97, and I struggled a bit (doppler was moving much faster than I was used to on some of the higher-orbit linear birds). The wind also made things so much more frustrating with noise to overcome. Still three contacts short of activating the park, I had to stick around for the 1640z ISS pass. However, I realized halfway through the pass when I could never hear my own signal that I was on the wrong uplink frequency. By the time I fixed that, the pass was way too busy with big guns for me to get in. A key pass in my plans totally wasted! Ugh. I was through about half of the reasonable passes for the entire day and hadn’t finished one park.
Luckily, the 1710z SO-50 pass was fruitful for me with four more contacts including the 4A100IARU special event station. Still dejected, I threw everything in the car as fast as I could and raced off to Little Jerusalem Badlands State Park which I will cover in it’s own post. I’ll discuss more of my thoughts of the whole trip in that writeup, but I will say here that my struggles were largely self induced.
Theodolite Screenshot from Lake Scott State Park
For one, I hadn’t bothered to program my new radio with any memory channels. I had a paper chart of frequencies, so I thought I’d have no issues. The prep work would have saved the 1640z ISS pass. Two, the nature of this trip requiring an overnight train ride meant I was very tired already and didn’t bring a lot of the “nice to have” pieces of gear like gloves. Running back to the car between passes was annoying and the cold was a distraction.
On the positive side, this activation not only helped toward my Kansas State Parks goal, but it also got me a new grid as a rover – DM98. I think posting my passes to Hams.at was beneficial as DM98 is reasonably rare for this part of the country, and there certainly seemed to be people who were looking for me (including my brother, KK4LWR, who was never able to get me).