For the 4th of July weekend, I decided to drive to the far southwest corner of Kansas to hit up Meade State Park as part of my mission of activating all Kansas State Parks on satellites. For a long time, I had thought about how I could make it to this park without committing to the full six-hour drive from Kansas City in one shot, but since I had a few days off and my wife was out of town anyway, I decided to just go for it and get it done.
I planned to head west right after work Thursday (7/2) and spend the night in Wichita before hitting up the DM96/EM06 grid line in northern Oklahoma for a couple of passes on Friday. From there, I would head to Liberal, Kansas—the nearest city with significant services to Meade State Park—visit the Mid-America Air Museum, which has long been on my list to check out, and then spend the night at Meade State Park, squeezing in passes Friday night and Saturday as needed. In the end, the weather – it was very hot all weekend and there were storms Friday night – motivated me to change my plans a bit, so I stayed in a hotel Friday night and didn’t get any passes in from the park until Saturday.
Meade State Park is a fairly basic park with decent campgrounds, day-use areas, and a lake in the center. There is nothing particularly notable about the park, but it serves a relatively large area of Kansas, as the next-nearest state park is several hours away. It is great to have parks spread out around the state, even if they don’t all have a particular “wow” factor, but I doubt I’ll be back to this one.
In terms of satellite passes, I attempted both FM and linear satellites, and it actually took me a bit longer than I anticipated to get the 10 contacts needed to activate the park. I started on the 1506z pass of AO-123 and was able to get seven contacts on that pass. I then jumped on the 1600z JO-97 linear pass, where I was able to grab two more contacts. Now needing just one more, I swung and missed on a relatively low SO-50 pass without any contacts before catching the next SO-50 pass a couple of hours later at 1811z, where I got four more. These holiday weekend passes are always tricky due to popularity, and it really makes it hard to plan these POTA roves around when there is so much pressure to get to 10 contacts.
I had tentatively planned for several more passes since I wanted to be sure I could get this park activated before I left, but with 13 in the log, I thought I’d try driving a couple of hours north to set myself up for another state park activation the next day.
On my way to the hotel in Hays, Kansas, I stopped off at Goodman State Fishing Lake, US-7429, for an attempt at some QRP CW operations on HF. This was an awesome little park with a basic pit toilet, a couple of sites with small pavilions, and room for primitive camping. When I arrived, there was a local there with his dogs running around, but after they left, I had the whole place to myself for a couple of hours. Sadly, the lake is largely dried up due to drought conditions, but it was still an excellent POTA site! Of course, HF conditions were poor, and I wasn’t able to get more than four contacts before my battery died, but it was a fun excursion for the afternoon. Afterward, I made it to my hotel in Hays and spent the night before heading to Cedar Bluff State Park the next day. I’ll have that activation report written up separately, so check back to see how that went!