Isle of Skye

Just a heads up that Caroline and I are heading for the Isle of Skye tomorrow. Given the length of the journey from Blackpool, an activation tomorrow is very unlikely, so look out for us between Sunday 26th June and Friday 1st July. We are staying at Sconser and there is a possibility that we will do one or both of the summits on Raasay but no definite plan. The only certainty is that we will not be activating the Inn Pin. The weather forecast for the week is not ideal :frowning:

We did a quick activation of Winter Hill on the way to Blackpool, and had our first equipment failure before even starting. One of the wires of the balance connector on Caroline’s LiPo battery fell off. Of course this did not prevent the battery being used, but would make recharging rather awkward. Fortunately I’ve been able to do a repair this morning, so I think all should be well. In addition we do have an extra battery, a spare battery, and an emergency battery…

HF conditions were not at their best, and at times I struggled with (distant) static crashes making it hard to read the chasers, plus some very deep QSB. I failed to pick up the callsigns of at least two who probably think they worked me.

Nevertheless between us we qualified the hill on 4 bands, which was reasonably satisfying.

Martyn M1MAJ

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Will be listening for you cause if now were spotless again and the CF no raise.
I can get Scotland well from this part of the UK .

Bring it on and hopefully we can catch you on air.

PS thanks for the heads up

karl

I will be on holiday for 2 weeks from tonight.
Hope to catch you for some S2Ss during the week.
No idea where I will be - depends on the weather which is looking less than ideal at the moment.:angry:

Robin, GM7PKT

Hi Martyn/Caroline,

ABW back from GD Land Saturday tea time. So will keep an ‘ear’ on your movements. New shack still not finished, but hope temp set-up will catch you on HF (me thinks VHF is pushing it a bit? - sorry Caroline :confused: - though I will be listening 500) though the skip is kinda long so possibly over the top of me :disappointed_relieved:

Hoping the midges don’t give you too hard a time

SOTA onward & upwards

73 Jack (;>J

I forgot to say that I have a gateway running between my DeLorme inReach and the APRS world. It should send position updates for M1MAJ every 10 minutes when we’re on the move, assuming the stuff I’ve left running at work carries on working.

Martyn M1MAJ

Hi Martyn,

I hope you and Caroline have a good holiday on Skye. I noticed that there is only one remaining unactivated SOTA summit on Skye which is Beinn Bhreac GM/SI-090. Will you 2 be activating this summit on this trip?

Jimmy M0HGY

I was just there! Went there for a week and got back late last night. Unfortunately I didn’t bring any heavy HF equipment overseas, but I did bring my HT. Went on the local repeater on the island and chatted with a nice guy named Bill, GM8RBR. He told me there are about 10 other hams in the area (not bad!). Good luck with HF! We had pretty nice weather there last week, but of course we missed out on the several weeks straight of sun and no rain. Good luck with the midgies! We were fine and had no problems.

If you don’t mind sharing at some point please open a new topic about how to do this. I’ve been looking at DeLorme for some time. I did wonder if they might disappear, but now Garmin have bought them I suspect the product line is secure for a while.
Thanks - Gerald

This is ace! Watching you closing in on GM/SI-090, Beinn Bhreac. One of those rare things in the UK… an unactivated summit! Bet the heather is hard going! I’m watching your average speed :grin:

Yes it was fairly slow going over rough ground, though the only real difficulty was a couple of barbed wire fences to be crossed without the benefit of stiles. We should be able to pinpoint the crossing points we found in the eventual activation report.

Plenty of space at the top with nice cylindrical trigpont (not at true summit, but well in the activation area).

I will try to do a write-up of the APRS tracking on our return. In brief, I’m just running a simple script which reads the points out of the DeLorme API and injects them into APRS.

Martyn

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You know you want one. Just buy it… life is too short etc. Seriously you can spot with it and now APRS with it. Go on, get the credit card out before the UK sinks!

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They all start this way. Then before you know it you have a few hundred thousand lines of code and the simple script is a multi-headed Hydra that bites you on the bum everytime you make a simple change. :slight_smile:

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Hi Martyn

Watch out for the midges they were biting here at my place in Aberdeenshire last weekend, which is very rare so they might be out in force over on the West… Will listen out for you but maybe to close…

73

Steve 2M0SKJ

Well that is one advantage of the weather we’ve been having - no self-respecting midge would be out. Actually we did get a few brave ones one evening as we were de-booting back at the car, but they weren’t out in force.

We have not yet needed the midge nets or the various repellents we have.

One tick carefully removed (from Caroline) so far. The O’Tom tick twister worked a treat - extracted the little beastie still alive.

Martyn

…and then you terminated it I hope

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Hi again Martyn & Caroline,

As mentioned on our QSO on 398 yesterday - pity I missed you on GM/SI-081, it would have been a new one for me - hi! But it was my own fault. I was watching you & Caroline’s progress on www.aprs.fi noticed you had reached the top and was waiting for you to call on 398. In the interim I had some lunch and watched lunchtime news. Didn’t check the spots - that was my mistake you were on 379 and latterly Caroline was on 7.125. By the time I did you had popped onto 20M - doh! So today if you are out and about I’ll try and do better :smile:

And just for the record. Following our QSO on GM/SI-058 and your 56 and my 59, when I QSY’d to try and work Caroline on 40M zilch, but I could here the southern G’s replying. And example of ‘over-the-top’ propagation - hi!

73

Jack (;>J

PS: maybe time to think about a dedicated channel/freq on 60M for SOTA. At times 398 can be a wee bit busy. But hey maybe this is me trying to shore up my Chasing abilities :relaxed:

Waiting for the post Boris bounce…

Well if were you I’d buy one before Mark Carney opens his mouth again. Next we’ll be voting to phase out decimal currency.

With what’s left of my pension fund I’m going to buy some bent bananas now they are no longer banned.

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I thought it was cucumbers… Or maybe it’s both.

It was cucumbers!