Hello fellow radio operators. September 4th, 2026 wasn’t your typical Friday commute. It was the Friday before the Labor Day holiday. I was working in Salinas for the day, about 2 hours away from home without the rush hour traffic. My commute home according to the Waze app was almost 3 hours due to the holiday. I figured that maybe I should stop at a POTA park and do some Park to Park hunting to wait for the traffic to die down. US-3473 was in the south side of my hometown of San Jose, and I never even heard of this park before. I found the entrance, paid the parking fee and drove in. There’s a nice visitor center by the entrance and at the opposite end of the parking lot a set of restrooms near picnic tables and a huge green space. I ended up parking next to a patch of grass where I could set up my 25ft whip antenna. With the antenna set up for 20m and my Yaesu FT-891 connected and powered up, I opened up my Ham2k PoLo app and started a new POTA operation. It took me a few minutes to get everything set up for the activation, since at this point, I’ve only used the app for hunting POTA and special events.
I made six Park to Park contacts and then ran out of activators to hunt. I can tell there were still a lot of hunters out there looking to make contacts, so I decided to spot myself on 20m and posted in the comment box, “My first POTA Activation!” and hoped to get four more contacts to activate my park and get back on the road home.
Boy, was I in for a surprise! After calling CQ for about three times, I made my first contact. Then another a minute later, another and another. I had short conversations saying I was nervous doing my first activation and everyone was so encouraging and said that I was doing great. Then I experienced my first pile up! It was an intense experience, I don’t know how I did it, other than picking the loudest ones first and going from there. A lot were from the usual states I’ve hunted: CA, WA, CO, ID, UT. Then I got 2 stations from AK. Then Alberta, Canada. The pile up kept on going, and I didn’t want to stop, but when I looked at the time, I knew I had to start heading home. I’ve already told the wifey I’d be home in 2 hours, that was an hour an a half ago! And I was getting tired, blood sugar running low and I had to go to bathroom! So I announced I had to QRT and took maybe 5 more stations, thanked all those left on the air and promised to activate again this soon. 40 total QSO’s made!
I’m officially hooked on activating POTA now. Thanks to all those that hunted me on my first activation, it was such a memorable experience and I can’t wait to activate again! 73!
