I didn’t intend to activate a park on this Monday before New Years Eve. I woke up around noon and noticed that the temperature was 15C/60F. I immediately thought, “I need to get myself to a park!”.

I took a look through my POTA TODO.org file to see what is the next closest park that I haven’t activated. There are two WMAs that are a bit of a challenge to get to. US-7777 is a mile hike to get inside the boundary of the WMA, and US-7778 needs a boat to activate.

The next closest after those is US-0705 Monocacy National Battlefield. This is yet another Civil War era memorial park. A bit of history I didn’t know was that the Confederate army captured cities and demanded a ransom for towns or else the town will be burned down. This YouTube playlist has some history on the ransom of Hagerstown and the eventual Battle of Monocacy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkUmdXXZbIQ&list=PLeAhjgX1tHtpB6prB3938uTiEI8EN5AOA

To be quite honest, I had little interest in activating this park. I almost put it off. I figured that since I had little time before sunset, I could get this park over with quickly.

After I looked through the maps and found possible locations to activate from, I left the house around 15:00. I saw that my ETA would be 15:30. That should be plenty of time until sunset at 17:55, so I stopped and got some drive through on the way. Ok, ETA is now 16:00. Still plenty of time to activate the park before sunset at 17:55… I parked at Gamrill Mill because it had some nice picnic tables overlooking a little pond. I looked at the picnic tables and they were directly behind the ranger station. I was a bit nervous about setting up so close to the ranger station. In addition, the setting was so calm and serene at this golden hour. I didn’t want to disturb the park visitors with my CQs and static.

I noticed that the sun was getting quite low for a sunset that was supposed to be almost 2 hours away. I check the the time of sunset again, and apparently I misread timeanddate.com and sunset was at 16:55, not 17:55. It was now 16:10 and I’m losing sunset fast. I gotta put up an antenna quick and get on the air. I slapped the 3 magnet mag mount onto the top of the car, screwed in a fully extended 17’ whip, and checked the SWR. Ok, less than 2:1 across the 20m band, good enough. I didn’t even bother with radials. I needed to get on the air before the ranger came by and shooed me away.

I set the power to 65W to put a little bit more oomph out the whip because I knew I was fighting the loss of poorly tuned antenna. Not much better than the usual 50W I use, but the race was on. I needed to get 10 contacts before the sunset.

The pile-up was strong today. I had to do the trick of hearing a part of a call like, “lunchroom noise … Yankee India … lunchroom noise”, and saying “Yankee India, again?”.

Most of the time the other callers will hold off and let Yankee India return my QSL, but today it was wild. People were stepping over each other.

I ended up winning the race with the sun and getting 15 contacts in 10 minutes.