DM/TH-828
DM/TH-828 Jenzig (385 m) is only 5 km away from my ‘second qth’ in Jena. I could see it from the living room if the windows were only pointing to the right direction. What is really funny about Jenzig is the optical illusion you get when you look at it from the city centre. The peak facing the city seems to be the summit of Jenzig, but it isn’t. The summit is 600 m away from this peak. The activation zone ends on the edge of the plain you can see to the right of the fake summit. That’s were I were i built my shack.
Jena Fire Brigade HQ and an illusion
Shack with a view
The ascent is only 100 m in height, but it is very steep. I expected the trail to be icy all over as the temperatures were swinging around 0 C the days before. But the trail was mainly snowy only with some icy spots. So I was faster than expected and cherished the view of Jena in the morning sun before bringing up the antenna. 10 m was dead and so seemed 17 m. Lots of traffic on 20 m. It was hard to find a frequency between all the big signals. Sorry for the abrupt end on 20 m, but some stations’ signals across the band were that loud that I couldn’t hear anything and didn’t know where to qsy. So I tuned to 17 m, calling cq and spotting myself. But no contacts were made there.
This could have been the last activation of TH-828, as it will be deleted from the SOTA list in the near future, according to SOTA-DL. 11 qso’s on 20 m, mostly the known european SOTA callsigns. S2S with ES2AG/p on EA2/BI-065.
Windy
Trail
Jena love
DM/TH-470
Shack on TH-470
DM/TH-470 Kaitsch (also known as Kötsch) is 497 m asl but it’s only a nice walk through the woods to the top. On the summit there’s the viewtower Carolinenturm. It’s closed during winter but that day there wasn’t any view anyway.
Carolinenturm
When building the antenna we recognised we lost the antenna’s top elements for 20 m and 17 m on our way. 10 m was dead as the day before so there was only one option left: cutting a piece of wire of my multiband-radials, winding it round some stick, attaching both to the aerial and trimming the wire to 17 m. Phew, good luck this worked and 10 contacts were made. MacGuyver would have been proud of me. On our way back to the van we found the missing 20 m element and shortly after the 17 m element. I’m a lucky guy!
YL and the recently invented wooden stick antenna
DM/TH-066
Memorial
Any McGuyver skills couldn’t help later on on TH-066 Ettersberg. The activation zone is where nazi concentration camp Buchenwald was. Today it is a memorial site. The wx had turned that bad that we couldn’t hardly see the memorial from a distance of 100 m. It was foggy and snowing. After building the shack I found out that…
…the bloody radio didn’t power up! GRRRRRRRRRR! I tried all tricks but it was no good.
Don’t know yet what the fault is, I’ll try to find it the next days.
