A Cloudy Day Devil’s Lake

I don’t often get to go back to Madison, but this time I found myself with idle time and figured I’d check out a park I’d always wanted to visit while I was there – Devil’s Lake State Park.

I used to go to the city it’s attached to – Baraboo – for various nerd events but never made it the additional 10 minutes out to the park itself. That was a mistake, this park is beautiful, big, and full of people. Of course, being full of people made it a bit tricker to find somewhere to activate where I wasn’t in peoples’ way, but I eventually found myself a little picnic table and spent an hour of FT-8 collecting contacts, including my first Cuba contact (CO8LY)!

The Radioddity HF-010 is new to me and I am still learning just how long those radial wires are when I am setting up, I barely kept it from going to the edge of the grass and into the beach! I don’t think it works quite as well as my Spooltenna EFHW but it is way more functional than it when there are few or no trees. I am debating taking it down to St Louis and seeing if I can activate Gateway Arch (US-0779) that way. We’ll see if it makes it into a future log post.

Final count was 31 official contacts and a nice summer’s day.