The weather forecast was predicting a nice day in North Wales so an activation in the area seemed like a good idea and by the looks of it I wasn’t the only one with the same idea.
Anyway the Cwm Eigiau Horseshoe has been on my list to do for a while and parking up by Cwm Eigiau gives you a 400m height gain too. So leaving my car at the end of the road - one down side of this start point is there are 3 farm gates to open & close on the way to the parking spot - set off down Cwm Eigau and up onto the north east ridge of Pen Llithrig y Wrach. The climb up to the ridge and the summit is as a friend of mine would put it “all off-track”.
A nice large summit to set the sotabeam up on and 16 QSOs later including 3 s2s’s, inc GW0PEB/P on NW-003 who I could almost see on Glyder Fawr just across the Ogwen Valley.
Onward to Carnedd Llewelyn.
This is where the fun started, having been using the recently aquired FT-817 with an external battery on NW-013 I continued to use this on NW-002. However during my second contact with G0OXV the battery was about finished - not a problem says I, I’ll just switch to the VX-150 which nicely charged should do me fne for the rest of the activation. Well to cut a long story short, the VX-150 decided it was going to receive but not transmit, grrr!! No amount of pressing buttons etc was going to change this.
Many thanks to Keith G0OXV, Mick 2E0HJD, Mike GW0DSP and Barry 2E0PXW for some super quick QSOs to allow me to qualify the summit on the last of the battery power on the 817 and apologies to all the other stations calling me especially the s2s that called me. It was very frustrating for me being able to hear you all on the VX-150 and not being able to respond.
After spending a good while pressing lots of buttons on the VX-150 in an attempt to resurrect the transmit function I eventually admitted defeat and made my decent over Gledrfford, a nice steady decent and unlike my last decent via this route in snow & low vis, this time I didn’t have to resort to compass bearings & pacing to ensure making a safe decent.
After returning to the car, opening & closing all the farm gates, I joined the bank holiday chaos on the A55 eastbound - another grrr!
One final note - consultation with the VX-150 manual has advised me how to reset the offending radio to factory default settings and this appears to have cured it of its refusal to transmit.
Iain, M3WJZ