I’ve written before about what hams who like to operate in the great outdoors are going to be doing instead of National Parks on the Air. Some states are going to be holding contests to encourage hams to operate from their state parks. For example, the Florida State Parks on the Air will be on the first Saturday in April, April 1, 2017 from 1400 UTC to 2200 UTC. It’s being run by the Lakeland Amateur Radio Club.
The Texas State Parks on the Air contest will be held the next weekend on April 8-9, 2017. Its sponsor is the Lake Area Amateur Radio Club (K5LRK). The Ohio State Parks on the Air contest happens on September 9, 2017.
Here in Michigan, a group has started the Michigan State Parks on the Air program. This is a bit more ambitious, in that it’s more like the ARRL’s National Parks on the Air. That is, it’s not just a contest, but rather an operating event that will take place over a period of three years.
Unfortunately, this group still hasn’t published any rules, nor do they have a website yet. For information on MSPOTA, you have to go to their Facebook page and glean what you can from there. One thing that confuses me is that they have been saying that only some of the parks will be “activated” each of the three years. So, if you don’t happen to live near a park that’s activated when you want to operate there, you’re kind of out of luck when it comes to participating in MSPOTA.
Perhaps the closest you can come to the NPOTA experience is Parks on the Air, which is the NA chapter of World-Wide Flora and Fauna. They have cataloged nearly 3,500 national and state parks, as you can see in the map below. As you can see, there are parks that you can activate in every state, plus Puerto Rico.
Not only that, the rules for Parks on the Air couldn’t be any simpler. The rules fit on a single page and there are only six bullet points!
As you can see from the map below, there are nearly two dozen parks that are within an hour’s drive from my home in Ann Arbor. I’m looking forward to activating as many of them as I can this spring, summer, and fall.
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