Parks On The Air (POTA) in Washington, D.C.: How to Earn the Cheetah Rover Award

By Carl W8WZ

Some friends of mine recently move to Washington, D.C. and invited me to visit them just before Christmas. Knowing that a visit to the nation’s capital is a wonderful opportunity to enjoy POTA due to the high density of national parks and monuments, I added a day to my visit dedicated totally to doing POTA. On 22 December 2025, the shortest day of the year, I spent 5 hours completing 15 activations using an Elecraft KX2 transceiver and two different telescopic whip antennas. Below is the plan I used. It is hoped that this article will help others interested in planning their own POTA rove to DC.

Park map

The big jackpot of doing POTA in D.C. is doing one activation that is a 7-fer. That means when the operator does an activation in that spot, he or she is actually activating 7 different POTA parks at the same time. This is possible because in this exact location several trails combine in proximity to other monuments in a park. So, if you set up in the exact right spot, your activation will be from 7 POTA parks at once. This spot can be a bit hard to find. I was fortunate that my friend John, K4EB had activated this location a few months before my visit, so he was able to give me exact guidance to set up in the correct location. This spot can be found by viewing the webpage for each of the 7 parks to find their legal boundaries then using google earth to overlay the information from each of those webpages and find the spot where the overlap happens. Here are the best instructions I can offer. First, get to The Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac National Memorial. This is POTA Park number US-0784 and is labeled as park 1 on the graphic above. This can be easier said than done as this park does not have an address. If you type “Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac National Memorial” into the Uber app, it will insert the address of the park’s administrative office in Virginia, not the address of the park itself. I learned this the hard way. To get around that, enter the name of a marina that is located in the park when ordering an Uber. Set your destination as “Colombia Island Marina George Washington Mem Pkwy, Arlington, VA 22202”. Please note that even though that address says Arlington, VA the actual location of the Marina is on Colombia, Island in DC. Uber will drop you off in the parking lot. Apple Maps will also take you to this parking lot if you are driving yourself and ask it to take you to the marina. If you are driving your own car and want to activate from the parking lot, you can do so but you will “only” be activating 4 parks at once instead of 7. Also, if you get out of the car and operate from one of the picnic tables near the parking lot you will be doing a 4-fer. This is certainly not bad! It is very pleasant to operate from one of those picnic tables and doesn’t require much walking at all. If you have mobility issues or just want to be as comfortable as possible, or your pota gear is not super portable and you don’t want to schlep it very far, then this is the best option. Operate from one of the picnic tables here, or from your car and do a 4-fer. However, if you want to activate 7 parks at once, then from the parking lot walk away from the marina towards the stone monument to LBJ. When you get to that stone monument walk towards the Washington Monument, which you will see across the river, walk across the parkway and setup under a tree that stands between the parkway and the Potomac. In that spot you will be in 7 parks at once. You will need to bring your own chair. I use a great little chair made by a company called Helinox that is very light weight. The 7 parks that are activated from this location are: US-4581, US-9901, US-4567, US-0670, US-0784, US-9898, US-4564. Here I used my 16-foot telescopic whip vertical antenna with ground radials and held the radio on my knee using a kneeboard while sitting in the chair. In very short order, I had made 14 contacts on 20-meter CW and was ready to move to the next park.

I walked back to the parking lot and called an uber to take me to the FDR Memorial which is located on the tidal basin and is park US-0776. It is labeled as park 2 on the graphic above. Here, after viewing the monument, which is very nice, I walked down to the tidal basin part of the monument and set up my station on a park bench. I put the antenna directly behind the bench where I sat and did not lay down ground radials. I sat on the bench with the radio on my knee using a knee board. I quickly made 18 contacts on 20 CW. This park (and every other park that I activated afterwards) is located on the national mall meaning that it counted as a 2-fer as I was activating both it and US-0655. From this operating position, looking to my left, I could see the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial (US-0785). So, I walked over to it and set up on a bench there in the same way. This is labeled park 3 on the graphic. I quickly had another 11 QSOs in the log and had already got 10 new parks activated. This park had more foot traffic than the FDR memorial had, but I was able to find an unused bench.

Vertical antenna by bench

Vertical antenna by bench

Next, I walked across Independence Ave. SW and into the area around the reflecting pool. Here there are several more parks, labeled parks 4,5,6,7,8 on the graphic. They are very easy to get to. They are, Constitution Garden (US-0653), Korean War Memorial (US-0780), Vietnam War Memorial (US-0793), WW2 Memorial (US-0796) and the Washington Monument (US-0794). Also in this area is the Lincoln Memorial. However, the Lincoln memorial was very crowded and had no bench near it that I could sit on, so I did not activate it. The monuments I activated all had park benches that I could sit on. Due to crowds in this area, I did not use my 16-foot vertical antenna. Instead, I used the Elecraft AX1 whip antenna connected directly to the BNC jack on the side of my radio with the radio on my knee board for those activations.

I used headphones so I did not disturb anyone with sound as I sent and received CW. This was as low impact/low profile operation as I could manage, and it worked very well. I did not seem to bother anyone or raise any attention from anyone else in the park, including the police and National Guard troops who frequently passed by, and I was able to make plenty of contacts at each park. My final activation of the day was at 4:30 PM at the Washington Monument. The sun was starting to go down and it was getting cold when I had activation at park 15 finished. I took an uber back to the hotel and entered my logs into the POTA webpage that evening. Activating 15 parks in one day earns the Cheetah Rover award, which was my goal. Thanks to the 7-fer and 2-fer I only had to do 8 individual activations to activate 15 parks. The temperatures that day were in the low 30’s. The tidal basin froze as I was activating the FDR monument and I could hear the sounds of the ice forming in the water, but it did not rain, and the wind was not bad. Even though less pleasant than being out on a nice day, being out when the weather was not perfect may have meant fewer other park users which made it easy to find empty park benches.

To activate all of the parks the way I did requires low impact radio equipment. There are no places for wires in trees along the Reflecting Pool and because there are many other people around, even vertical antenna systems need to be compact and close to the operator. The Elecraft KX2 and AX1 combo along with a knee board and plug in KXPD2 paddle really made this easy. At one of the parks there was a picnic table, and I was able to operate from that which felt like a luxury after having been using the knee board until then. There was a food truck near there so I got a pretzel so that as I sat at the table using the radio I would look more natural to the passer by if seen eating a pretzel (or that is my excuse at least). I also took advantage of that tabletop operation to plug in an external battery to preserve the built-in battery as much as possible. At that activation, I ran 10W. When using the internal battery, I limited output to 5W to conserve battery.

When I got back to the hotel, I had an e-mail from Chaise KQ4WJP saying that his contact with me when I was activating the Korean War memorial was his first CW contact! I put a paper QSL card in the mail to him as soon as I got home. Also, while activating that memorial I made a Park to Park contact with AC5XK who was activating the Washington Monument just across the reflecting pool from me! Some DX! I also worked N4FFF who worked me with a prototype QRP rig he is building. He was powering it with a 9 Volt battery. So, not only was I in interesting locations, but I also made interesting contacts too.

Here are links to the gear I used:

Antennas:

While in Washington, DC I also took time to visit the Spy Museum. This is an especially fun museum for radio nerds because it has several World War Two era spy radios on display including a paraset. It also has a display about the enigma and the work done at Bletchley Park during the war. Adding that to a POTA rove makes for a great radio vacation in the nation’s capital. Using the little Elecraft KX2 after looking at the display of field spy radios from the 1940’s certainly makes one appreciate the advances in technology!

WWII spy radio

KX2 with AX1

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