WK4DS Amateur Radio Blog
Alafia River POTA: How 12 Meters Delivered 72% DX While Everyone Else Fought on 20m
Everyone defaults to 20 meters for POTA. It's crowded, competitive, and honestly…boring at this point. So at Alafia River State Park (US-1829), I did something different: I skipped 20 meters entirely and focused on 12 and 15 meters instead. The result? A 72% DX rate on 12 meters, contacts to 10 different countries in under an hour, and some of the best propagation I've experienced from a Florida state park. All at 10 watts.
Everyone defaults to 20 meters for POTA. It's crowded, competitive, and honestly…boring at this point. So at Alafia River State Park (US-1829), I did something different: I skipped 20 meters entirely and focused on 12 and 15 meters instead. The result? A 72% DX rate on 12 meters, contacts to 10 different countries in under an hour, and some of the best propagation I've experienced from a Florida state park. All at 10 watts.
Let me show you why 12 meters is the band everyone's ignoring while they pile up on 20m.
Why I Skipped 20 Meters Entirely
Look, I get it. 20 meters is the default POTA band. It's where everyone goes, it's where the hunters expect you to be, and it's reliable. But reliable also means crowded, and crowded means QRM, pile-ups, and fighting for frequency space with a dozen other activators doing the same thing.
We're near solar cycle maximum right now, which means the higher bands (10m, 12m, and 15m) are performing like 20m used to during previous cycles. But most POTA activators haven't adapted their band strategy yet. They're still automatically going to 14.061 MHz CW or 20m SSB without even checking what's happening higher up in frequency.
So today at Alafia River State Park with Chas (who was also activating), I made a conscious decision: skip 20 meters completely. Start with 12 meters, see what happens, then move to 15 meters. If those bands produced nothing, I could always drop to 20m as a backup. But I had a feeling 12m was going to surprise me.
Spoiler: it absolutely did.
The Alafia River State Park Setup
Alafia River State Park is designated US-1829 for POTA and it's located in Lithia, Florida, just southeast of Tampa. The park has a really nice covered pavilion with picnic tables, bathrooms, and RV camping area with good tree coverage. Spanish moss everywhere, typical Florida scrub vegetation, and plenty of tall trees for wire antennas.
The covered pavilion where we set up for the activation. Clean facilities, picnic tables, and good tree coverage for wire antennas.
Chas and I both set up under the pavilion, him at one table, me at another about 20 feet away. This gave us enough separation to avoid too much RF interference between our stations, though we still had to coordinate who was transmitting when to avoid stepping on each other.
My antenna setup was a 65 foot random wire thrown up into one of the larger trees near the pavilion. I'm guessing it got maybe 30-35 feet up into the branches, which isn't spectacular but it's what I could reach with the available trees. The radiator came down to the tuner that is tied up high on the corner column of the pavilion. I also used a larger set of radials so the antenna would be more likely to work on 40 meters. But that didn’t seem to matter as I would come to find out…
This is the tree branch I had my wire antenna ran out to, if you look close, you can see the wire antenna in the photo.
Now here's where I need to be honest about the equipment struggles today... I am not immune to making common, simple mistakes and here are a couple from today that I actually did. I started out on 40 meters and wanted to work some stations there since it was supposed to be about 9:30 when I would be starting the activation. Well, that isnt how it went at all. I started out usng the Elecraft T1 antenna tuner with the sBitx. This turns out to be a problem though, you see JJ and the team added a high SWR protection script in the new code and if the SWR goes over 3 to 1 then it automatically turns the output power all the way down to prevent it from killing the finals. Well, it seems that as the Elecraft T1 goes through the tune process, the SWR will rise above 3:1 and this shuts off the RF from the radio and the tuner cant finish the tune…
Elecraft T1 Antenna Tuner with wire antenna and ground radials tied to pavilion column.
But before I figured this out, there is another small detail… The sbitx tune feature is simple, hit a button and it will “dead key” the radio and hold that for a time. Both the level of power and the time are adjustable in the menu so I set it to 20 seconds and the level to about 5 watts as the T1 is a QRP tuner. The Elecraft T1 can tune about anything you want to use for an antenna to a usable SWR so I was confident in the little tuner. Soooo, I would hit the tune button on the sBitx then sprint over to the tuner and hit the button on it to activate the tune feature on the tuner. The tune timer on the sBitx would finish right as I would get back to the radio. I would check it with a Morse code key in CW mode and the radio would and SWR of 5 or 6 to 1 and the output power would be turned all the way down… I would turn the power back up to 5 watts and then try again. I performed this comedy act a few more times before seeing the “SPLIT” button was on and that the B VFO was on 15 meters!
Armed with this knowledge, I confidently turned off split and immediately found myself back to the HIGH SWR alarm on the sBitx… No matter what I did, as soon as the Elecraft T1 would start the tune cycle, it would trip the radio SWR protection feature and this would turn off the transmitter in the radio and by extension, also shut down the tuner mid-tune… Frustrated by this revelation, I found myself getting the Penntek TR-35 out of the bag and using it a couple of times to find out it was doing the same thing! After spending 30 minutes doing this, I finally threw in the towel and just went out to the truck and got my MFJ941 manual tuner and the nanoVNA and connected it in place of the Elecraft unit.
But the fun doesn’t stop here! I could not get this one to tune either! What was going on here!!! Well, it turns out that I had at some point switched the MFJ’s antenna selector from wire to the next antenna port and didn’t check it so I was effectively tuning the SO239 connector on the back of the tuner to 40 meters!!! Good grief, this has been a mess! Once I figured this out and set the tuner to the correct antenna, it tuned up almost instantly. This whole debacle took over an hour to sort out, so if you think you are not very good at POTA setup and breakdown because you see these “old pros” doing it effortlessly, just know we are not immune to errors and odd problems either…haha.
Back to the rest of the activation report…
Radio-wise, I was running the sBitx v3 at 10 watts maximum. For those not familiar with QRP POTA operations, 10 watts is pretty normal power level, it is about 1/10th of what most people run. But it's what the sBitx puts out reliably on all bands and that is well within the Elecraft T1 tuner’s power handling capability (remember, I had started with this tuner), and honestly, with propagation conditions this good, power isn't the limiting factor anyway.
I had my Dell laptop for logging contacts in HAMRS (the POTA logging software), a foldable keyboard because typing on a laptop in bright sunlight is annoying, a CW paddle, and the usual field gear—water bottle, clipboard with paper log backup, etc. Pretty standard POTA kit.
12 Meters: The Band Everyone's Ignoring
I fired up the sBitx on 12 meters around 1600 UTC (11:00 AM local time) and started calling CQ on FT8 at 24.915 MHz. Within seconds, I was getting responses. And not just USA stations, I'm talking Greece, France, Netherlands, Spain.
The station: sBitx v3 running 10 watts, MFJ-941 manual antenna tuner, Dell laptop for logging, Begali Traveler CW paddle, and field keyboard. This setup delivered 72% DX on 12 meters today!!!
The first contact was PB2A in the Netherlands at 1620 UTC. Signal report was strong both directions. Okay, that's promising! 12m is open to Europe!
Next contact: EA5KB in Spain at 1622 UTC. Also solid copy.
Then SV1GYN in Greece at 1626 UTC, followed by SV8EFJ (also Greece) at 1631 UTC.
This is when I realized 12 meters wasn't just "open" to Europe it was absolutely on fire! In the next hour, I worked:
Three stations in Greece (SV1GYN, SV8EFJ, SV7FDA)
Two stations in France (F4IFO, F6BIA)
Spain (EA5KB)
Netherlands (PB2A)
Portugal (CT1FIU)
Czech Republic (OK1DTC)
Poland (SP2GCJ)
Plus Brazil, Dominican Republic, and Canada as bonus DX
That's 10 different countries in less than an hour on 12 meters. With 10 watts. From Florida. To put this in perspective: of the 18 contacts I made on 12m, 13 were DX (non-USA). That's a 72% DX rate.
When was the last time you heard anyone report a 72% DX rate from a POTA activation? This is why solar cycle maximum matters, and this is why you should check 12 meters before defaulting to 20m.
The propagation held solid from about 1606 UTC until around 1657 UTC when it started to fade. That's nearly an hour of wide-open conditions to Europe from a Florida state park with a wire antenna and 10 watts. Just... chef's kiss (I saw someone else use this term and it absolutely applies here, lol). This is what amateur radio is supposed to be.
15 Meters: The Reality Check
After 12 meters started fading around 1700 UTC, I switched to 15 meters to see if the party was still going. Spoiler: it was not.
15 meters wasn't dead as I made 10 contacts between 1738 and 1748 UTC but the DX had evaporated. Out of those 10 contacts:
8 were USA stations (domestic)
2 were Germany (the only DX and were way down in the noise)
That's a 20% DX rate on 15m compared to 72% on 12m. The contrast was striking and immediate. As soon as I moved from 24 MHz to 21 MHz, I went from European pile-ups to mostly USA stations.
This isn't a knock on 15 meters, it's just propagation and we all know how the sky likes to mess with out brains…. By late afternoon (1730-1800 UTC), 15m was transitioning from long-skip DX to shorter-distance USA contacts. Which is fine if you need domestic QSOs to reach your 10-contact activation threshold, but if you're chasing DX, 12m was clearly the better choice earlier in the day.
The lesson here: timing matters just as much as band selection. 12m was the star of the show from 1600-1700 UTC. 15m was better for domestic contacts after 1730 UTC. If I'd started on 15m at 1600, I probably would've missed the entire European opening on 12m.
The 40m and 10m Bookends
I also made a few contacts on 40 meters and 10 meters to round out the activation, mostly just to see what those bands were doing.
40 meters (4 contacts): Mostly short-skip USA stations. Nothing surprising here as 40m in the afternoon is for regional contacts. It works, it's reliable, but it's not going to give you Greece with 10 watts and a random wire thrown over a tree branch.
10 meters (4 contacts): Had a brief opening but nothing like 12m. A couple of USA stations and some Caribbean/Central America. 10m can be spectacular during solar max, but today it was just "okay." You could just watch the stations fade in and out on the band here on the waterfall…
Final tally for the activation:
Total: 36 QSOs
12m: 18 QSOs (50% of total) - 72% DX rate
15m: 10 QSOs (28% of total) - 20% DX rate
40m: 4 QSOs (11%)
10m: 4 QSOs (11%)
Modes: 50% CW, 50% FT8
Twelve meters did half the work and delivered nearly all the DX. That's the story.
Operating With Chas: Multi-Operator Coordination
Chas (NA2B) at his operating position with me in the background. Multi-operator POTA setup at Alafia River State Park—he's about 20 feet away to minimize RF interference.
Chas was set up about 20 feet away at another picnic table under the same pavilion, also activating US-1829. We coordinated our operating so we weren't transmitting on top of each other. He started on 30 meters since I was on 40 and after I finished on 40, I jumped all the way to 12 meters so he could move slowly up the band through 20 then 17 and even 15 before he got his 60 and called it a day. He runs 50 watts currently and has great success with it, but the QRP bug has bitten him and he is going to be turning down the power dial soon… or so he says… haha
This coordination is important for multi-operator POTA setups. You can absolutely operate two stations simultaneously from the same park, but you need enough physical separation to avoid RF interference (20-30 feet minimum), and you need to pay attention to who's transmitting when. If both operators key up at the same time on different bands, you'll hear it immediately as front-end overload or mixing products.
It actually works out pretty well though, you have someone to talk to between contacts, you can share band information ("hey, 12m is wide open to Europe right now"), and if one operator needs help with something technical, the other person is right there. Plus it makes the drive more enjoyable when you're carpooling to the activation site (which we didn’t do this time, but this point is still valid). All of this and it is just plain fun to hand out with a like minded person for a while and just have the fellowship.
Chas and I have done several multi-op activations now and we've got the coordination pretty well figured out. As long as you're mindful of the RF environment and don't step on each other's transmissions, it's actually a really fun way to do POTA.
Lessons for Other POTA Activators
If you take away one thing from this activation, let it be this: check 12 meters before you default to 20 meters.
Most POTA guides and YouTube videos focus on 20m and 40m because those bands are "reliable." And they are! You can almost always make contacts on 20m or 40m during a POTA activation. But reliable isn't the same as optimal…or fun..
We're at solar cycle maximum right now (or very close to it), which means the higher bands—10m, 12m, and 15m—are performing better than they have in a decade. But those bands are only open during certain times of day, and you have to actually check them to know.
Here's my recommended POTA band strategy for 2025-2026:
1. Start with 12 meters during daylight hours (1500-1900 UTC / 10 AM - 2 PM local) Check FT8 on 24.915 MHz or CW around 24.900-24.910 MHz. If you see European or South American stations, stay there. Don't move until the band fades.
2. If 12m is dead, try 15 meters next Same time window. 15m opens a bit earlier and stays open a bit later than 12m.
3. If both higher bands are quiet, then drop to 20 or 17 meters You haven't lost anything by checking 12m and 15m first, it only takes 5 minutes to scan FT8 and see if there's activity. But if you skip straight to 20m, you might miss the entire European opening on 12m.
4. Add 40 meters in the evening or early morning 40m is your regional workhorse. Use it to fill in USA contacts if you need to reach your 10-QSO activation threshold.
5. Keep an eye on 10 meters during solar max 10m can be absolutely bonkers during cycle peaks. Sometimes it's dead, sometimes it's a highway to Japan. Worth checking.
Key point: Solar cycle conditions change everything. The band strategy that worked in 2019 (solar minimum) doesn't apply in 2025 (solar maximum). Adapt your approach, check the higher bands first, and you'll be rewarded with DX that most POTA activators never experience because they're stuck in the 20m/40m routine.
The "Skip 20m" Strategy: Does It Always Work?
Okay, let's be realistic here. Will 12 meters always deliver 72% DX rates? No, of course not. Propagation is fickle, solar conditions vary day to day, and sometimes the higher bands are just dead. The sun giveth and the sun taketh away.. lol.
But here's the thing: you don't know until you check. And checking takes 5 minutes to tune to 24.915 MHz on FT8, watch the waterfall for 1 minute, and see if you're decoding any DX stations. If it is a yes, start calling. If no, move down to 20m like you were going to do anyway.
The worst-case scenario is that you "waste" 5 minutes checking a dead band and then go to 20m as your backup. The best case scenario is that you find a wide open band to Europe with zero QRM and work 10 countries in an hour with 10 watts.
I'll take that bet every time.
Also worth noting: 12 meters is way less crowded than 20m. On 20 meters during a weekend, you're competing with dozens of other POTA activators, contest stations, and regular QSOs. On 12 meters? Most of the band is empty. You can call CQ on an open frequency without worrying about stepping on someone else, and when DX stations hear you, you're often the only POTA station they can work on that band.
Less QRM, better propagation, higher DX percentage, what's not to love?
Alafia River State Park: Worth Activating?
As for US-1829 specifically: yeah, it's a nice park. The covered pavilion makes POTA operations comfortable even in Florida weather (sun, rain, whatever), the facilities are clean and modern, there's RV camping if you want to stay overnight, and the trees provide decent antenna support.
It's about 30 minutes southeast of Tampa, so it's accessible if you're in the area. Not a destination park like some of the big state parks, but definitely worth activating if you're looking for a Florida POTA location that isn't mobbed with tourists.
The tree I used for the 65-foot random wire was a large pine tree of some variety with good height and thick branches for support. Spanish moss everywhere, typical Florida landscape. Got the wire up to maybe 30-35 feet, which is serviceable if not spectacular.
One note: there were RVs parked in the camping area about 100 feet from the pavilion, so we weren't completely isolated. Nobody bothered us though, and one RV owner came over to chat about amateur radio for a few minutes. Friendly folks just out camping.
Best time to activate: Late morning to early afternoon (local time) if you want to catch the 12m European opening. Earlier in the day if you want 40m to be productive for longer distance USA contacts.
Facilities: Bathrooms, covered pavilion with tables, RV camping, paved parking. Bring your own food/water.
Antenna options: Plenty of trees for wire antennas. A vertical would work too if you prefer.
Final Stats and Conclusion
Let's wrap this up with the numbers:
Total QSOs: 36
12 meters: 18 QSOs (50% of total) - 72% DX rate
15 meters: 10 QSOs (28%) - 20% DX rate
40 meters: 4 QSOs (11%)
10 meters: 4 QSOs (11%)
DX Worked: 12 different countries
Greece (3 QSOs)
France (2)
Germany (2)
Brazil (2)
Plus Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, Czech Republic, Poland, Canada, Dominican Republic, US Virgin Islands
Modes: 50% CW, 50% FT8 Power: 10 watts QRP Antenna: 65-foot random wire at about 30-35 feet
The takeaway: 12 meters is the secret weapon for POTA DX during solar cycle maximum. While everyone else is fighting on 20 meters, you can have an entire band nearly to yourself with better propagation, less QRM, and DX rates that would make any contester jealous.
So next time you're setting up for a POTA activation, do me a favor: check 12 meters first. You might be surprised what you find.
Thanks and get your radio out!
Have you worked DX on 12 meters during POTA activations? What bands are you checking during solar max? Drop a comment! I'd love to hear what's working for you.
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73, David / WK4DS