Lakes Around Hamilton for Portable Radio Activities

Portable Radio Awards

Hamilton city sits within the Waikato Basin, which doesn’t have many large hills in it. This is a bit of an issue for someone who wants to participate in radio award schemes. SOTA ( Summits on the Air ) is a popular award scheme for activating hills. POTA ( Parks on the Air ) is another scheme for activating large parks, but there aren’t many that are close to Hamilton. However, Hamilton has plenty of lakes near it, which means it is ideal for an award scheme unique to New Zealand: The New Zealand Lakeside Award.

A good chunk of the lakes are publicly accessible, and it would be easy to set up a portable radio station. The goal of this is to make contacts with other radio stations across New Zealand and meet the requirements of the New Zealand Lakeside Award. Since there are so many lakes near Hamilton city, it should be straight forward in getting to at least ten lakes activated. It took a bit of time to scope out the different lakes and see if there was a public road to it. I’m hoping this list may be helpful to other people as well. I didn’t set a hard limit as to what I considered “close to Hamilton”. So the driving distance from Hamilton to the lakes are semi-arbritary, I’m just going off of what I would consider to be “close enough” to Hamilton. It should be something easy enough to knock out in half a day.

Here is a compiled list of lakes near Hamilton city that have public access:

Public Accessible Lakes around Hamilton City

  • Lake Ngaroto
  • Lake Areara - More Info - Access via Driver Road
  • Lake Kainui (Lake D)
  • Lake Rotokauri - Access is via Bunyard Rd.
  • Lake Cameron
  • Lake Te Ko Utu (Cambridge)
  • Horseshoe Lake
  • Lake Serpentine / Rotopiko - open 0800 - 2000 hrs - More info
  • Lake Rotomanuka - Vehicle access is opposite Ryburn Road
  • Turtle Lake (in the Hamilton Gardens)
  • Lake Rotoroa (Hamilton Lake)
  • Lake Karapiro - This one is pushing the distance requirement.

I’ve already activated the last two lakes in this list. That means I just need to activate the others and I’ll be at the basic level of the New Zealand Lakeside Award. From there it would only be 40 more activations to reach the honour award. There’s several more eligible lakes near Huntly, which is only a little further north of Hamilton. So the Honour award should be reasonably doable within a couple of years.

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