About me
W4IO — licensed ham, park chaser, and the guy in your pileup calling from a beach chair with a dying battery.
I'm W4IO, operating from Ooltewah, Tennessee in the EM75 grid. Some weekends you'll find me at a picnic table somewhere with a wire in a tree or roof of my truck, working Parks on the Air. A few times a year the radio comes on vacation, which is how the Caribbean pages on this site came to exist.
I like portable operating for the same reason a lot of people do: it strips the hobby back to the part that's actually interesting. A radio, a battery, an antenna you put up yourself, and whatever the ionosphere feels like doing that afternoon. When it works from a crater rim on a volcano, it feels earned in a way that a big station at home never quite does.
Station
Field: IC-705, hamstick, delta loop, f-loop, end-fed halfwave, or a vertical when there's salt water nearby. Home: IC-7300MK2, end-fed halfwave. Logging with GridTracker, uploading to LoTW, QRZ, and Clublog.
The club
I'm a member of the Tennessee Valley DX Association (TVDXA) — a group of DXers and contesters around Chattanooga who have collectively forgotten more about propagation than I've learned. If you're anywhere near the valley and you're serious about chasing DX, come to a meeting. Their site is at tvdxa.com.
QSLs and confirmations
Everything goes to LoTW within a few days of getting home. Full station details, QSL preferences and current contact info are on my QRZ page — qrz.com/db/W4IO.
Worked me from a park and need a confirmation, or planning a trip to one of the islands here and want to know what the licensing was really like? Send me a note.
Activation map
Open the mapEvery POTA reference in the United States on one map — around twelve thousand of them, pulled from the POTA database and cached on the server. Amber stars are the parks I've put in the log; the blue dots are everything still on the list. There's a dropdown to zoom to a state, and every marker links to the park's page on pota.app.
It's the same question I get asked at the picnic table — which ones have you done? — answered in one screen instead of a spreadsheet.