After racing over from Lake Scott State Park and the somewhat frustrating activation I experienced there, my trip to Little Jerusalem Badlands State Park ended up being a nice change in scenery (literally). This park has actually been on my bucket list for some time just to visit and explore, so I was excited to get there, get the park activated, and explore. The park is much simpler than other Kansas State Parks in that it does not have any campsites or water feature, but rather is a small network of trails extending from a parking lot around the formations created by chalk sediment from when an inland ocean covered the area tens of millions of years ago. Not what you picture when you think of Kansas!
This park is nice in that the parking lot has a nice grass picnic area next to it with plenty of tables to spread out. It was a relatively cold and windy day, so while there were numerous cars in the lot and people exploring, the picnic tables were empty. I brought my gear out to one and got set up for a couple FM passes. While getting ready, I had a wildlife photographer come ask me if I was tracking wildlife which was a good guess! I have gotten that assumption while out on satellite roves in the past.
Since these were the last two FM passes of the day with decent elevation, I felt the pressure to make some contacts. In particular, I knew the initial ISS pass was going to be busy with it being almost directly overhead. At 1817z, I got set on the ISS pass and got to work. I was quickly able to make six contacts on this pass, although it was not all easy. I even had a couple repeats from Lake Scott State Park earlier in the day.
The next pass, SO-50 at 1848z was a bit lower in the sky, but went from southwest to northeast. I knew this meant the first half of the pass would be more fruitful, and I was right as there was a minute or two at the end of the pass where it was just me and one other rover calling out looking for contacts. I was able to get my four contacts easily here as well, and I almost worked a couple more where we couldn’t get the whole contact done. This leads to one “gotcha” with doing satellites for Parks on the Air – the required ten contacts rule does not take the satellite into consideration for determining a unique contact. Rather, that rule considers each station you talk to by band. In the case of these satellites, that means that if you work the same person on two satellites, but both satellites happen to use 70cm uplink and 2m downlink (or vice-versa), those are not considered unique contacts. In this case, I worked the ISS and SO-50 which are both 2m up and 70cm down. I was able to accomplish my ten contacts with ten totally unique calls, but this is something you need to watch out for if doing POTA with satellites. This is also why I transcribed all my passes on this rove before I left the park; the stakes were too high to accidentally miss the activation!
Knowing I had successfully activated the park and realizing how exhausted I was from the poor sleep on the train the night before plus the drive, I decided that attempting the next planned park, Cedar Bluff State Park, was probably not a good idea. It would have added probably two and half hours of driving to my trip that day, and there were really only two viable passes I could do once there. Both passes were linear satellites (RS-44 and AO-7), and I was not confident I could get ten contacts between just those two passes. Instead I decided to walk some of the trails at the park before driving back to Garden City, grabbing some food, and exploring the area. Western Kansas is a neat place. It is still prairie but noticeably shorter grass than I’m used to seeing out near Kansas City. The rockiness of the landscape also lets you know you are getting close to Colorado and dry desserts of the west. My train back east ended up being almost two hours late, so after boarding around midnight, I pulled into Union Station in downtown Kansas City around 8am. I slept much better that night!
I really enjoyed this trip even as quick and stressful as it was. My goal in activating all the Kansas State Parks was to see the state which has become my new home while bringing in a ham radio twist, and this was definitely a perspective on the state I had not seen yet. I will be coming back out this way to Meade State Park (which is farther south) as well as Cedar Bluff State Park when I finally make that activation. Not sure on timeline for those yet, though. I think my next few parks will be within a couple hours of KC so I can knock them out on a Saturday morning or afternoon.
