The POTA community is dealing with the loss of a popular and prolific operator. On the 4th of July, Tripp Owens N4NTO had finished an activation at US-11375 Averasboro Battlefield Historic Site in North Carolina, about halfway between Fayetteville and Goldsboro. Tripp had set his status to QRT on POTA.APP and was apparently taking down a mast when it fell across a power line and electrocuted him.

Tripp was really active in the hobby, with nearly 20,000 POTA QSOs across 84 parks and 664 activations. He was a daily visitor for quite a while at US-6956 Tar River State Game land, and I’d bet that if you looked, you’d find Tripp in your log, as did just about everyone who chimed in on the POTA Discord server.

Sebastián KI2D, developer of PoLo, the Portable Logger, noted on Discord that Tripp had been using PoLo on the activation and that he was able to reconstruct the activation from records on the PoLo server. Sebastián felt that the final activation should be uploaded to POTA.APP as a tribute, and I can’t agree more. As of this writing I don’t see it on Tripp’s POTA page yet.

That this could happen to an experienced operator with hundreds of activations in the log is, I think, a sobering reminder that just the smallest inattention can have tragic consequences. Most of us can look back at our years in the hobby and point out a few times that we dodged the bullet…it doesn’t mean that we’ll always dodge it. Think about your setup and stay safe.

Here’s a small tribute from Youtube by Dom NC4XL:

Rest in peace, Tripp, I’m sorry that we won’t hear your CW music on the airwaves any more.

[Cover photo: WRAL.com]