Activation Details
| UTC Day | July 18, 2025 |
| Park Designator | US-2412 |
| Bands | 20m, 17m |
| Modes | CW |
| Contacts | 24 |
| Radio | Icom IC-705 & AH-705 Tuner |
| Antenna | 9:1 EFRW |
| Power | 5 Watts QRP |
Hello from Maine! My wife and I are on vacation this week checking out both Portland and Booth Bay Harbor. We stopped for some POTA at Two Lights State Park, about 20 minutes outside of Portland.
The park is located directly on the coast and the views are spectacular. Contrary to the name, there aren’t any lighthouses in the park, which the park ranger at the gate pointed out to us on our way in. It does, however, feature an unused fire control tower and battery left over from World War II.
Setup & Gear
We found some shade and I used my new POTA33 mast I brought with me. This mast is excellent — it’s lightweight, easy to put into my checked luggage, and sturdy enough to be free standing if you lean it against something. I paired it with a 29’ end fed random wire with a 9:1 unun and a 17’ counterpoise.
I used this trip as an excuse to only bring wire antennas and I wanted to run 5 watts QRP as much as I could. Even with that constraint, I still ended up bringing more gear than I needed.
This trip is also the first field activation I’ve done with a key from Modern Morse. Aaron over there is doing some really great work and I really highly recommend getting one of his keys. I placed an order for a white and red storm trooper style key a while back and he called me to tell me that he was having a lot of difficulty to get the white cases to all match up with some being a mismatched off white.
He was great to work with and gave me a bunch of options for colors which led me to this green and black combo that came out really well. As of writing this, it looks like he’s paused new sales to get caught up on the backlog. My key took over a month to arrive and I was happy to wait.
Activation
About halfway through the activation, two park staff came up to us and were curious about what we had in the tree. They were great — but they had seen it from far away. Walking back up, I could see why they noticed and came to check us out:
The mast was all but one section extended to accommodate the 29’ random wire antenna and was very visible.
I put 24 contacts in the logs between 20 and 17 meters. I started on 10 watts but switched to 5 watts halfway through the first contact and had no issues runnign QRP the entire time.
A pretty good spread on the map but I was pretty concentrated on the east half of the country:
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back with more POTA soon.
73, Ben WØARR