We’re off to sunny Scotland. Well it had better be sunny; we’re fed up with England, it seems permanently submarine these days!
Jimmy and I have just pored over the maps, and come up with a very skeleton set of alerts. I expect these will be needed to be taken with a pinch of salt, by the chasers, and indeed by us.
Who knows what the weather will be? Who knows what the best day to go out in the Cairngorms with Barry GM4TOE will be? Who knows if the two Cairngorm summits we have guessed will match with Barry’s expert recommendation and local knowledge?
Who knows where we will be staying in the “middle day” when we have to find a night’s accommodation somewhere in between the booked Lossiemouth week (Friday to Friday) and the booked nr Stranraer week (Saturday to Saturday)? Who knows what day the boatman will advise for the Ailsa Craig DXpedition? Who knows if/when Marianne will put her foot down and say “no more disappearing early for SOTA”? Who knows if Marianne will put her foot down and demand additional family walks, forcing us to add even more SOTA activations to the schedule? (I know, ridiculous, but I have always been an optimist).
So I guess the posted alerts are more to provide a ‘flavour’ of our intentions, rather than a definitive itinerary.
Notes on working conditions: The plan is for Jimmy to use 145 FM using his handheld and SOTA Beam, and for me to use 40m CW with 817 & dipole. Jimmy likes 2m FM and always prefers to try this first. In the possible/probable event he cannot qualify on 2m FM, he will use 7.118MHz SSB (+/- QRM), which worked so well for him from Ben Nevis GM/WS-001 last year.
Several of our intended summits are “SOTA virgins”, so it will be essential for Jimmy to get the first timed QSO, before me. I have several “first activations” to my name, but Jimmy has yet to register one, so that is a priority for him on this vacation.
So there you go. We look forward to working many chasers in between the haggis stalking and deep fried Mars Bar hunting.
Tom M1EYP