My kid and I went out to activate US-1589 Patuxent River State Park.

There were two locations that I scouted for activation. One was the Patuxent River Nature Center (39.23929884210381, -77.05864241903075). The other is a location at the end of a long dirt road called Brown Church Rd (39.318858564773144, -77.1775463352946).

I took the elevations of both locations. The Brown Church Rd location was 100m higher than the nature center. Brown Church Rd also looked like a wide open field, so this looked like the best place to activate.

As soon as I started setting up, a car pulls up. It seems I had attracted the attention of a concerned neighbor. She asked if I was looking for my lost dog, but I’m sure that was just a cover story.

She could not see my from her house because of the trees. I was nowhere near any houses. She must have seen me drive-by and because I didn’t make a U-turn and come back out, she decided to check me out.

I told her that I was doing ham radio. She replied, “Hmm, I guess that’s not illegal. Be careful, the park ranger comes by often.” Then she left. This put me on edge to say the least.

Shortly after she left, a large pickup truck pulled up and sat in the lot for about 15 minutes as I set up the radio. They had an NRA sticker and a rifle stick on their back window. I assume they were a hunter. After some time they left. Best case scenario, they went to the wrong location to meet their hunting buddy. Worst case, they were sent by the lady to watch me.

I put up the 17’ whip and noticed that my SWR was a bit off. When I inspected the antenna, I noticed that one of the radials had come out of the crimped forked spade connector. I stripped the wire with my teeth and wrapped the wire around the lug. The ground was pretty dry and rocky. The SWR still wasn’t great, but good enough to tune.

Other than that, the activation went fine. 20m was crowded so it took me some time to find an empty frequency. After I did some QSOs, My kid took over and called CQ while I logged the contacts. This was their first activation, and they did really well.

I wish I got pictures. I’m terrible at remembering to do that. I think if I was going to activate this park again, I would set up my station at the nature center. It was clear that these folks didn’t take kindly to strangers.