Our planned activation of Billinge Hill G/SP-017 today will help towards two celebrations - the BYLARA 40th Anniversary and the Worked All Britain 50th. Awards are available for both.
Work multiples of 12 YLs for the BYLARA Award. For WAB there are many 50th year awards on offer, but the square we will be in today, SD50, is particularly collectable!
73
M0TMD/P and G4TJC/P
http://bylara.org.uk/awards-2/bylara-40th-anniversary-award/
I’ll be with Helen, planning to try FT8 again. Let’s hope my setup still works!
Note that I don’t qualify for working a YL, and I’ll give Helen priority for a spot near the trig.
73, Simon
When I bought my 1st WAB book, the award scheme was 22yrs old. Will someone tell me where the last 28 years went please?
Snowing quite hard here so I don’t think I’ll be out SOTAing.
Where did the last 28 years go.
Life gets in the way.
Cheers Ken G0FEX
When I bought my first book, it was 8 years old and I was an SWL. I’m missing 42 years!
Many thanks to all those who worked us today. Conditions on 60m and 80m were not great! Apologies to those waiting for 40m - change of plan to 20m. Thanks to Allan @GW4VPX for qualifying the summit for me, and to operators in EA1, GW and SV for the summit-to-summits. 
For those collecting trigs, I was near enough for it to qualify.
It was not unpleasant at 0 degrees, but the chills set in after a couple of hours in the snow. 
The hill was busy with families, sledgers and dog-walkers. Must have explained our goings-on at least half a dozen times, so all very good.
73
Helen M0TMD/P
Thanks to everybody for chasing me on FT8 and CW.
It took ages to get going. The tablet had forgotten the set-up for comms to the FT817 (via a Bluetooth dongle) and put up a bit of a fight restoring this. Then once I was on-frequency nothing was decoding. Running a WiFi hot-spot on the phone to allow time synchronization fixed this.
80m was fairly easy-going, with only 4 UK stations logged, but numerous continental transmissions received at lower S/N. 40m was a bit mad with very little space on the standard dial frequency. I recognised several frequent chasers amongst my QSO partners - thanks.
One more problem I experienced was my track-pad (a little keyboard-integrated Bluetooth job) becoming unresponsive to cold fingers! But on the little 8-inch screen it’s very hard to control WSJT-X with stubby fingers.
Switching to CW for some traditional QSOs Javier, EA2GM/P, found me straight away for S2S. Then you all kept me busy until I had to QRT - sorry. Helen and I got off the hill just as the rain came, but not before grabbing a 2-m S2S with Andrew, MW1CJE on Glyder Fawr.
Thanks for the summit Helen…it was difficult then you came up out of the noise. Did you get Stateside? Not a whisper from you Simon 
73 de Allan GW4VPX
Hi Allan - no Stateside. I heard one station calling another over the top of me, a good 57, but none came back to me. Tried for S2S with a CT station but couldn’t make it through the pile up. Bit of an odd activation, but well qualified.
73
Helen
Hi Helen
That must have been the Stateside that I heard and thought he was going back to you. Out tomorrow on Waun Rydd with Mal and Ian…hope to hear you and others if the bands behave.
73 Allan
Excellent - should be listening 
I’v been having trouble with FT8 on 80m this weekend, with very little seen on the waterfall even when I knew the band was quite busy. So I set it going this morning and again finding only very sporadic decodes left it to it’s own devices whilst I went about my day, with not much hope and even less thought. So imagine my surprise when I finally got round to having a look at what I’d snared:
122530 -19 -0.2 1752 ~ CQ SO G4TJC/P
122900 -18 -0.2 1089 ~ CQ SO G4TJC/P
124000 -19 -0.3 446 ~ MW0IDX G4PDF IO93
124530 -24 2.1 1506 ~ P90TRG/R WU3WDD/R R107
125945 -16 -0.1 1497 ~ G4TJC/P G4OBK IO94
Sorry I wasn’t by the radio to try a call Simon but given the very patchy decoding I doubt we’d have made it.
Quite fun these FT8 events in their own peculiar way, looking forward to participating in more 
73 de Paul G4MD
Sorry you missed me Paul.
Sadly I didn’t get a decode from Phil. But it’s great to be able to go back to the files to have a look.
