POTA SYP Weekend at Hamburg State Park

POTA SYP Weekend GA State Parks Motorcycles

Jan 18, 2026

I can’t believe it’s been five years since Ben KO4KVH and I got our Technician tickets and started RF Quests. A lot has happened since then, with the last two years being busy moving to a new city, getting through Hurricane Helene (which happened in the middle of the move), and earning our motorcycle endorsements.

Yes, you read that ‘motorcycle’ thing correctly: about a year ago, we both passed the MSF BRC course and earned our motorcycle endorsements. Whereas Ben has wanted a motorcycle since he was a child (his mom was a nurse, so you know how that ended), I never had any interest. None that is, until we visited a local dealership: I threw my leg over a dual sport bike (TW200), sat on it for a moment, concluded that this mid-life crisis thing could be fun, and wanted my own set of two wheels!

As you could imagine, in true RF Quests fashion, where we combine radio with adventures, our bikes are absolutely going to make appearances in our ham radio life.

Now that you have a little bit of backstory, on to the POTA activation! For Support Your Parks (SYP) weekend, we decided to activate Hamburg State Park (US-2183) because it is relatively close to our house and is a somewhat scenic drive through curvy country backroads. Initially, we were both planning on riding our motorcycles to the park because the weather forecast was predicting a mostly nice day with moderate temperatures and because Ben was wanting to test out some new gear on his motorcycle (namely, panniers and a new top box as he is wanting to do some touring later this year). Although I’ve ridden my bike to this park a couple of times (once for a POTA activation), the morning of the activation, it ended up being too cold and windy for my tastes (my bike lacks some of the creature comforts of Ben’s Vstrom, such as heated grips and a windscreen…), so I opted to drive the Miata instead.

VStrom and Miata Suzuki VStrom and Mazda Miata. Not pictured: Kawasaki Z500 because KO4KVG is a fairweather biker.

For this activation, I had a some radio equipment and accessories that I wanted to test. I have an underutilized Yaesu FT-891. I purchased it in Spring 2024 hoping I’d immediately get the chance to take it out for POTA. Unfortunately, the aforementioned events of the past couple of years have allowed the 891 to be a nice piece of decor in my office. I also wanted to try my Bioenno LiFePO4 battery out in the field, as it’s also been in my office nearly unused since I returned with it from Hamvention. Finally, we recently acquired a Faraday cloth to use as our ground plane for our GABIL GRA-7350T vertical, and I was interested to see how it would perform.

Once we arrived at the park, Ben unloaded his panniers, and carried the bags to our usual activation table, where we began our setup. After I adjusted the antenna to operate on 20m and verified that the SWR was sufficiently low (using a NanoVNA), we were ready to start. Being SYP Weekend, 20m was unsurprisingly busy, and I was able to make three P2P QSOs in less than 20 minutes before finding an open frequency to operate on. We spotted ourselves on pota.app, and we quickly had a small pile up. Within 30 minutes, we made 21 QSOs, including three more P2Ps.

Closeup of GABIL GRA-7350T vertical antenna

(L) Radio setup showcasing the Faraday cloth ground plane (R) GABIL GRA-7350T vertical antenna.

Working through the pileup was a bit more tiring than we remember, likely because we have not activated much over the past couple of years and our radio endurance has faltered (we also still use paper logs). Thus, we decided it was an ideal time for a lunch break, where we spent most of the time discussing how the wind is going to make for an interesting ride home (the gusts were pretty intense). While waiting to see if the wind would die down a little, I lengthened the antenna to operate on 40m. Unfortunately, other than hearing a couple of ongoing ragchews, I did not observe much activity on 40m. It is also worth nothing that for us, we’ve had less success with this antenna setup on 40m, which may have been a contributing factor. After hunting on 40m for P2P contacts to no avail, we decided to call it an activation, packed up (note that the Faraday cloth packs up MUCH easier than the aluminum screen we’ve used in previous activations), and we headed back home.

(L to R) Radio setup for POTA activation; Closeup of Bioenno LiFePO4 battery; KO4KVG on the air.

All in all, it was a great day to be at the park for the first of hopefully many activations this year. We’ve recently purchased a SOTABeams carbon mast to affix our EHFW antennas to for our future QRP operations, so we definitely want to get out in the field again to test that setup. Also, I’m counting down the days to warmer weather where I can join Ben for POTA on a motorcycle!