I had the privilege to activate this morning the very last non activated SOTA summit in my birth land EA2/NV. All of the summits have been activated now.
This summit is located in the very Eastern end of Navarra territory.
In fact, this summit is a border one shared by Navarra (EA2/NV) and Huesca (EA2/HU) territories, but it’s kept the Navarra EA2/NV reference.
I got up at 6h15 local (4h14 utc) to get ready in time to drive the 97 Km to the village of Fago in the province of Huesca and be there by 8h20 to meet my ex-University friend and loyal SOTA companion JAP there for another joint hiking and SOTA activation.
We followed a GPS track downloaded from Wikiloc and it was a pleasant and easy to follow one:
This is Lucho leading the group.
A look back here when we had already reached a significant height.
Beautifully forest covered mountains.
My hiking and SOTA companion JAP taking his own pics.
The Pyrenees mountains were still partly covered with snow.
The hike took us 1h25 minutes and this is the summit trig point as I just got there at 9h50 local (7h50 utc).
We were astonished with the great views and spent some time taking a few pictures.
We had a great view of Mt. Txitxirimurria, which I activated with JAP for the first time in May last year.
Then I set up
…and started my activation on 20m CW by 8h20 utc, just 20 minutes later than the alerted start time.
Propagation on 20m was surprisingly short and several stations from Spain made it to the log. Worths mentionning that I was operating on 14.280 when another SOTA activator from Portugal, who I couldn’t copy and I guess he couldn’t copy me either, started his activation on that very same frequency. Some activators alerted the colleague from Portugal that there was another SOTA activation going on that frequency, but he seemed to keep going anyway, as I could copy other chasers making QSO with him. The situation became very confusing with crossed QSOs and a bit of chaos, so I left the frequency and went QSY.
I activated on:
- 20m CW, where I logged 24 QSOs in 22 minutes.
- 20m SSB, where I logged 25 QSOs, 3 of which were S2S.
- 30m CW, where I logged 11 QSOs, 1 of which was S2S.
This is the full log with 60 QSOs in total:
The S2S log:
On my way home, I still couldn’t help not stopping to take some pics of the great mountains in this area.
Thanks dear chasers for your calls and QSOs.
Best 73,
Guru