For the 2m Activity Contest and Club Championship on Tuesday 5th May 2009, the weather did not look promising. In fact it was worse, with high winds and constant drizzle, and this only deteriorated through the evening.
It was tricky getting the 2m SOTA Beam up on the pole in such conditions, but the new version of the SOTA Beams guying kit, with four guy strings, certainly helped.
There are various operating points on The Cloud from which to choose, according to the prevailing wind. For some reason, Tuesday nights always see me perched in a slight depression beween the trig point and the last few steps up to the summit to achieve optimum comfort.
By just after 8pm, I was cosily inside my bothy bag, and connecting battery, feeder and microphone to my FT-817. I commenced with the beam pointing south, and enjoyed a very promising run down to serial number 31 on my own QRG of 144.325MHz SSB. I then chased around other station’s frequencies pretty much until the end of the contest at 10.30pm, apart from a couple of brief runs on my own frequency.
I didn’t make it into six figures, but my score of 90,285 is probably my best yet. 13 multipliers were JO02, IO63, 74, 75, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93. 5 DXCCs were G, GW, GM, GD and EI. One S2S was with M6AXL/P on Rombalds Moor G/NP-028. Other contesters on Winter Hill and Long Mynd were not SOTA-qualifying expeditions.
By 10pm, the storm was really whipping up and bashing the bothy bag around in deafening style. I concluded that I was mad, as did many of the fellow contesters that worked me! I finished with 64 QSOs - my best ever in a VHF activity contest - but, as ever, with the sense that there were still plenty that “got away”.
Tom M1EYP