Skeeter Hunt in Andover, New Hampshire
August 2015

Dave K1SWL, Tim W3ATB and I had a wonderful Skeeter Hunt! We met in Andover,
New Hampshire for lunch and then went to a nearby park and set up our stations. We were
planning at first to do a multi-op using one call, but we changed our minds, thinking if we
operated with our own calls, there would be more activity. Tim brought an HB-1B and
operated on 20 meters with a Par Endfedz. Dave and I set up a KX3 with a 50 ft. wire as
an inverted L. Fortunately, there was a scoreboard right near our operating position. It was
hard to keep count of all the QSOs!



Tim was wracking up the QSOs on 14.060... all skeeters. You can see from his smile that
HE was having fun.



Dave and I were in my camper van on 15 meters. I'd make 3 QSOs and then
I'd hand the key to Dave and he'd make 3 QSOs. I'm not sure how Dave did,
but I worked Spain, Slovak Republic, Sweden, France, the Azores, Netherlands
and Luxembourg.



After operating for an hour or so, we decided to jump on our bicycles and take
the rails-to-trails route to Potter Place and set up there. It's a 15 minute bike ride
through some beautiful countryside. We packed up the gear and headed west on the
trail. We stopped along the way where a passerby took a picture of us in front of the
covered bridge over the Blackwater River.



There's a restored railroad station at Potter Place. It operates now as a museum. Before setting up
again, we took a quick look inside.



Several picnic tables sit on a slight hill across from the station. Behind the tables are several
tall maple trees. We tossed a line over a high branch and pulled up a 28 foot wire as a vertical.
This time we all used the same rig. One person would make a contact, and then we passed the
key around so everyone could log the QSO. We were on 14.060 and started working other
portable skeeter stations.



From Potter Place we logged KX0R in Colorado, K4YND in Virginia and a couple of DX stations
from France and Germany.



By 4:00 pm we decided to pack up and head back to the cars. We all had a
fantastic afternoon and look forward to next year's event. Thanks to all for
the QSOs and thanks to Larry W2LJ for organizing the New Jersey QRP
Skeeter Hunt.