I’m going to head to a Southern CA drive-up summit (Thomas Mountain - W6/CT-016) Friday evening local time to camp. I plan to activate in the evening/night, as well as into the morning. I am really hoping for some DX S2S. I have alerted for 27-Apr-2019, 0400Z with S+18 in the comments. I will likely operate no later than noon local time on Saturday (1700Z).
Will be running 100W with a half-square antenna (inverted groundplane, phased verticals), on the 20m band. SSB, CW, and Digital modes are all options. I will have a linked dipole with me as well that I will likely set up in the morning to run 30 and 40m for US chasers and activators. I’ll have something up for local VHF as well.
Please let me know if you’ll be on a DX summit and want to try to connect.
I’m very interested in your activation plan. I never worked summit in North America and it is rare to get on the air at daytime of our local time. Can you operate FT8 as a digital mode? I can operate CW but will be running 5W with a dipole antenna. So I think FT8 will be better for a chance of QSO.
The weather will be OK here. I’ll plan to activate a local summit.
Sounds great, Aki. I will have FT-8 set up as an option, and would love to try to work you via both modes. I will be watching for spots - I am fairly certain I will have cellular reception at the summit.
Thank you very much for the QSO. It was my first Summit from North America and was very excited. I was running 50W with dipole at that time. I brought FT-991AM to increase possibility of our contact.
After the contact, I worked a couple of chasers from EU, VK, ZL, NA in about 10 minutes with 20W. Then the battery went up.
It was cold and very windy on the summit, but I enjoyed ham radio.
How was your SOTA camp? Looked you worked lots of summits and chasers.
Aki, I had a fantastic activation! I will post a full report in a day or two.
In total, I made 136 contacts, 33 of which were DX. Of the 33 DX, 19 were VK, 7 ZL, 4 JA, 1 SA, 1 ON, and 1 VE. I also managed a total of 19 S2S contacts.
Many thanks for the S2S DX QSO! That was one of my goals for the year. You had a great signal into W6 land with your 50W.
