Laurent, F8CZI, has been in Graz again, so we decided to go over the border today to do a joint activation in Slovenia. There are quite a few summits that are well served by roads, so we took the opportunity to go and collect a winter bonus on a nice sunny spring day. I had imagined that being a little more south of Austria, and with all the warm weather we have been having, that there would be little or no snow to deal with, so I took a risk and went in my summer shoes. In the event, there was still a good covering of snow, but it was well compacted, so my feet stayed remarkably dry. The summit is home to an aging geodetic tower:
It will fall down soon, and we had absolutely no intention of climbing it, but we did decide to live dangerously and set up on some dry ground just below:
Laurent has built himself an End Connected Windom that we had time to get properly tuned before starting the activation:
We took about 2m off in total. It performed very well and now has a much more reasonable SWR across all the bands. I called first on 20m and got 6 contacts from the usual suspects, SA4BLM, EA2DT etc, all good strong signals. Once I had wrung 20m dry, Laurent had a go on 30 and 40. After the spot got through he had a pretty nice pile up. As we were packing up, I noticed a bird had made its nest in the enormous crack in the tower. I tapped the tower with my trekking pole and it poked its head out to see who was creating such a disturbance, much to our amusement.
On the way back to the car we found someone had made a nice snowman at the top of the piste:
After reprogramming the GPS for the next summit, Možičev vrh, we set off down the hill. By this time it was midday and we decided to stop at a restaurant we passed at the bottom of the hill. It was a good choice as they did a shockingly large burger and chips for just €6.50 (I do like Slovenia):
After eating all that, I was quite out of breath when we reached the next summit. The road up was unmade and a bit alarming at first, but not too desperate all in all. At first we parked in the wrong spot and one of the land owners came out to talk to us. Luckily, they were very nice and simply pointed us in the right direction with their good wishes. When we got to the top we found it was quite well forested, but with enough room for a full size antenna:
This time, Laurent took 20 and 30m and straight away got 2 contacts stateside. I took 40m and managed to squeeze in at the top of the band. There were not as many callers as I expected on 40m. Maybe everyone was out enjoying the spring sunshine. However, I got my activation, as did Laurent, and we set off for home quite satisfied with a great day out. The drive down the mountain was also pretty alarming and these are not roads for those affected by travel sickness. However, the view was spectacular. Well, it’s paragliding for me tomorrow, and I think Laurent is thinking of heading over to Kärnten to activate his first summit in that region. Until next time, thanks for chasing!
73 de OE6FEG
Matt