Well I was a tad late on parade due to work but I managed to get myself set up on Wendover Woods G/CE-005 and on the air at about 1840 UTC from my “comfy” activation spot.
Things looked encouraging when, soon as I switched on the VX5, I heard Dave 2E0BYA/P on Titterstone Clee G/WB-004 on 145.425. So when he had finished his QSO I jumped in and started the evening with a S2S. A pretty easy QSO with good signals each way.
I was beaming north(ish) horizontally. Great, I thought, this is going to be easy with all these S2S QSO’s that will come rolling in.
So next I let Dave get off to SSB whilst I took the frequency to work the “pile up”… nothing!
So I went back to .500 and called for a while. This continued whilst I spun the beam a little until I ended up with a couple more QSO’s with G0FIR and G0JZE.
Then I called more… and more… and more… and then started looking for QSO’s to break into. But before I did that, I switched the beam back to vertical just in case I was missing someone.
…and I was indeed missing the clobbering my receiver was now getting from my desense source nearby. Anyway I persevered and was rewarded with a call from M3PSF in Redditch.
Having completed that QSO, I called few more times on .500 and tuned around but with no more QSO’s, I decided to call it day and avoid being locked in the Woods.
So a fun time and a “qualified” summit but having done this 3 times on 2m FM, I will be back with HF and/or 2m SSB soon to give some more far flung chasers the benefit of my local summit!
73 Marc G0AZS