I Almost Didn’t Start This

The first obstacle was not the gear, the website, the platforms, or the editing software. The first obstacle was starting.

POTA is the timeline. Life is the story.

I kept thinking the hard part would be learning the cameras, getting the audio right, setting up the platforms, or figuring out the workflow. Those things mattered, but they were not what stopped me.

The hard part was being willing to begin before everything felt finished.

I wanted the story to be clear. I wanted the site, the field notes, the radio setup, and the entire creator system to make sense before I stepped out in public. But that is not how real life works. Real life starts before everything is ready.

The day it became real

On August 9, 2025, KB2KHL went on the air from Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac National Memorial—POTA US-0784.

The photograph from that day is not a polished production still. It is better than that. It is the actual scene: a portable station spread across a picnic table, a scooter parked beside it, an antenna in the trees, and a logging screen waiting for contacts.

The station was built around a Yaesu FT-891, a SOTA/POTA 150 portable antenna, a RigExpert AA-650 ZOOM antenna analyzer, and a Powerwerx PWRbox-20 Mini portable power box with a 20 Ah battery. It was a serious little field station carried into the park without needing a truckload of equipment.

That setup produced 12 QSOs in 21 minutes and 48 seconds.

Twelve contacts are not a world record. That is precisely why they matter. They turned an idea into something that had happened. They gave this project its first real point on the timeline.

Twelve lines leaving one picnic table

The contact map shows what radio does so well. From one small operating position near Washington, D.C., the signal reached stations across the eastern half of the country. Every line represents another operator who heard KB2KHL and answered.

The map is more than an activation report. It is evidence of the moment hesitation gave way to participation.

What the Field Journal is for

This journal is the written record of the journey: the place, the park, the log, the lesson, the photograph, the failed attempt, the quiet thought, and the reason it mattered.

Some entries will grow alongside full Field Stories or videos. Others will stand by themselves. A meaningful day does not need an episode before it deserves to be remembered.

There will be activations, road days, gear experiments, mistakes, lessons, faith, stewardship, and pieces of Life 2.0 that do not fit neatly anywhere else.

The honest beginning

If I had waited until everything was perfect, this activation would not have happened. Neither would this journal.

Faith does not usually hand you the whole map. Sometimes you just get the next step. On this day, the next step was a picnic table, a portable station, and one call into the air:

CQ Parks on the Air. This is Kilo Bravo Two Kilo Hotel Lima.

Then someone answered.

That was enough to begin.

God bless. Until next time, leave it better than you found it. 73.