It was just plain hot and humid. With temps in the mid-80s(30c) and the humidity in the 60’s, the climb up to Hamburg Mtn under the windless decidious canopy of trees was a sauna. In short miserable. But I wanted to activate this mountain which is a mere 8 miles from my house and had somewhat committed to the SOTA community. In retrospect, it became a “walk in the park” but not a valid summit activation!
From the SOTA site, I followed the google terrain map and a “trip report” from slackpacker.com. The directions were reasonably straight forward and I soon was on “top” of the bald along the ridgetop of the Hamburg Mtns. It was a straight forward setup using my Jackite 28’ fibreglass pole and my “alligator” dipole jumpered for 20m. The bands were in terrible propogation shape and the QSB swings more than 20db deep but I was able to eeek out 8 qsos in the midwest, Alberta Canada, and to Coloradio before the heat, humidity, and impending thunderstorms coerced me to pack up and return to the parking lot.
It wasn’t until that evening as I was preparing the trip report that I noticed the discrepancy between the trip reports and the actual peak of Hamburg Mtns HP actually located about 5 mi to the north of where I operated! After deleting the SOTA activation, I posted a corrected google maps on the SOTA site! Sorry to those chasers who hoped for some points, perhaps only VA6FUN. The ARM lat/longs were correct. My mistake was following a posted trip report by a hiking club and some incorrect google map information. But I’m in luck! Now I get to hike and activate the REAL location!
What is wrong is the Google Maps link submitted by Dave, W2VV which is miles from the summit and is thus misleading (and anyway is unnecessary). His submitted hike info also refers to the wrong location. A case of mistaken identity I expect!
It does show the perils of relying entirely on the accuracy of information submitted by others.
In reply to N7UN:
Hi Guy…I’ll pull the log entry…thanks for the effort anyways! I hope to catch you next time! I am heading on a Lighthouse activation trip to Lake Winnipeg in a couple weeks and will be starting to island hop with my kayak on weekends to activate islands for CISA program so not sure how much SOTA chasing I’ll be able to do…but we’ll see!
In reply to N7UN:
Thanks for the effort Guy and thanks for finding the error!
But nice to know I will have another shot at chasing you from there
FYI the map links were added at a time soon after the addition of the NJ region when the official map links were not working over the course of weeks. But I guess now that the wrong reference has been removed, there is no need for any other references as they could confuse things as the official sotawatch reference is correct.
Thanks Tom for your help. This will eliminate any possible confusion in the future for other activators who want to go to this site. I do plan to go back to the “correct” peak perhaps this coming Saturday, June 12th. Will post my actual plans.
In reply to G0PEB:
Yes, Steve/wG0AT, myself, and possibly another victim, errrr, activator are planning another N0B special event (see http://n0b-14er.blogspot.com/) this coming Aug 14th and 15th. Last year we were surprised when Kurt/HB9AFI called us with a good 559 report for us in HB. View the video 'cause we got it on sound and video! So if the propagation improves, we should have a good connection into Europe and Great Britain!
