I (Eric) wanted to get together with past club member Stuart and when I called for a coffee Stuart suggested we head out to a park and play radio. I said I planned to be at Campbell Valley Park this Friday and so we decided to meet there and operate. Stuart had his BuddiPole Antenna and Kenwood radio with a nice new battery power pack. I went with my usual go kit consisting of the Elecraft KX3 with 100watt amp and my Spider beam OCF and mast.

We arrived at 12:15 and made our way to the covered tables. I set up my usual station configuration and dialed up the 10m band. Stuart assembled his vertical and station and made for the 20m band to operate CW. Unfortunately he wasn't signed up on POTA so he missed out on spotting himself there. I spotted myself and started getting responses. With the two stations quite close I had a fair amount of QRM from Stuart's CW calls so he moved to 17m to see if it reduced the effect. It may have helped a bit. Before long I managed over 30 contacts. Stuart had a few and wanted to keep going  a while longer so I went back and tried the 15m band but the interference was stronger there so I returned to 10m and continued calling, by the end of our time there I had 48 contacts logged for POTA. Stuart had a handful and one was from Japan. We both had a great time. Club member Jim came by for a quick hello, and chatted with Stuart, I had a busy run going and didn't want to break it. Stuart enjoyed the time operating with another ham. We plan to repeat our fun next week and wait on coffee for another day.