Our expedition to DM/BW in the newspaper ( PA0SKP & PA3FYG )

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SOTA trip Monday 23 Febr – Friday 27 Febr. with my radio friend Sake.

I infected Sake with the SOTA virus in August 2011, when he visited me on a camping in Slovenia. He achieved Mountain Goat status on 11-Feb-2015, congratulations.
When Sake was struggling in 20 cm snow near the path to find the exact GPS spot and I was placing the antenna near a nice cabin on DM/BW-038 “Lemberg”, we met a man who happened to be a newspaper journalist .He was very interested about our activities and asked if he could place an article in the local newspaper. He was not prepared, so did some writing on my QSL-card and made a picture with my camera. After diner I mailed the picture to him, and the next morning he mailed the article to the paper. CW-guys were lucky that afternoon, Sake did more than the usual number of QSO’s, while I was informing the reporter about ham radio and SOTA. He did well considering the lack of knowledge about ham radio and the short time we had available. ( Time is “points”, instead of money )
By the way, we had a nice trip and were very lucky with the weather. On the outward journey we had all rain until we reached the first summit a5 14.50 UTC, but managed to activate DM/BW-846 and BW-052 before arriving in our holiday house.( a 700 km trip ). On the way back it was snowing for an hour, then raining until we reached PA, so no activations on the way home.
In total we activated 15 summits in three and a half day, only three were “drive-on”, the rest was struggling in the snow. Of course most of the times no nice shelters or seat, so just sitting in the snow. Glad it was not getting dark before 17.30 utc ( 18.30 local ) hi hi. At the end of the day it was hard to find chasers and qrm on 40m is very strong.
We used the KX3 from Sake all the times, my FT897D stayed in the bag pack.
You can see and read the article and see some pictures on my site Domain Default page. Our names are not always ok in the article, but who cares. I am wearing my one cap, so I am sitting at the right!
Hope to hear you soon again,

73 de Sake PA0SKP and Hans PA3FYG

6 Likes

Well done!!

73 Hans

Hi Hans,
Did you get a copy of the paper by any chance - if so could you scan and put it in this report? If not do you know which newspaper it was for - they may have an online version on their web site.

Thanks for the contact from DM/BW-195 and S2S between DL/AL-169 and DM/BW-159.

73 Ed
P.S. Congrats Sake on the Mountain Goat!

Well done Hans & Sake… I know some of those summits you visited…much easier in the summer hihi…

OK on you infecting Sake Hans - I have done the same with Dave G3TQQ who lives local to me and who is seriously affected now by the SOTA virus. Dave was sat in the snow this afternoon on G/NP-032 Cracoe Fell having got stuck for a time battling his way in his Land Rover to the parking place. He made it and got his WB points with just 5 VHF QSOs!

30 mins of operation in winter, sitting on a piece of thin foam or a plastic sack on frozen ground is sufficient for most of us… Add to that another 20-30 minutes setting up and taking down and you know you have been outside for a while… The activator is KING…you operated for a significant time on the ones I followed you on… thanking you both for the chaser points.

Ed - their is a link to the newspaper page in Hans posting, and I know you are a fluent German speaker from when we had the meal on Pfander last year, so you will be able to understand it… I did an English translation using Google Translate and it reads well and gives a good laymans representation of our branch of ham radio.

Best 73 Phil

If you go to the link and click through to the link to the article, you get there from the word “HERE” near the bottom, it opens as a PDF file of the page in the paper.

I’m not good at Dutch, but I could follow the story. :smile:

It looks like a good story for our cause, even if the reporter got the names round the wrong way, so congratulations on the publicity for SOTA in the Netherlands.

It was double dutch to me till I discovered it was in German :smile:

You would have thought I would have noticed that, as I did CSE German at school… :blush:

Thanks for adding the reference Hans (it wasn’t in the original post Phil :smile:).
I can read German no worries.
Here’s the article from the (German) local newspaper. As all have said good publicity for Amateur radio Hans and Sake!

Tks Phil for your information of DM/BW-159.So we started in the right way.
We found the footpath to the top!! That was great!
Alle the chasers thanks for working us. We had a great time!

Sake

de Hans was PA0DLN hihi

Great stuff Hans - glad I could help. It’s good to share information in our community. I hope my next SOTA trip onto the EU mainland is as successful as yours and Hans was.

All the best,

Phil