Hi folks, for those not in the know, OSPOTA, or Ohio State Parks On The Air, is coming up on September 11.  The contest runs from 10 am to 6 pm and the club has been activating Harrison Lake State Park for the past few years. The multiplier for the contest is other State Parks in Ohio, but any and all QSOs can be logged and used as contacts against those multipliers.  We usually set up a few rigs and encourage any club members to come out to play on HF for the day.  In recent years, we combine this with an end-of-summer cookout around 1 pm.  That is still the running plan for this year.

Now, for the change in plans.  We usually set up at the Marzolf shelter house on the south-west corner of the park, but with the pandemic still raging earlier this year, the reservation system for the park was not online until a few months ago, and the short answer is that I simply forgot to book it.  This presents a slight challenge as all of the shelter houses are booked for that Saturday, but this situation is not anything we can't work through.  We know of a couple of picnic areas which "are first come first serve", one of which is right beside the Marzolf area, alongside Co Rd M, one is over by Co Rd 27 on the south side of the lake.  A small generator should be all we need for the event.

We plan to scout these areas out next weekend to make sure they will meet our needs.  For inclement weather, we should be able to put up an EZ-UP or two.  Further updates as we have them, but we still plan on activating the park.

Apologies to all, I normally reserve this in the spring, and the reservation system was not accepting anything.  It completely slipped my mind by early summer.

More information on OSPOTA can be found here: https://ospota.org/