YO/EC-195 - Piatra Sugaului - 2014.11.08 by YO8SEP/P

Activation Reports
1

First of all, I want to apologize to all chaser I didn’t worked, for having to leave on short notice because of rain.

On Friday, me and XYL made plans to spend a weekend in mountains. The weather forecast was very good. Arrived at a friend’s chalet late in the evening and started to make hiking plans for Saturday looking at a beautiful moon.

I told them I’m interested on SOTA and YO/EC-195 was close to our route. Looking at the OSM map, the hike didn’t looked so hard and my friend told me it will be 2 hours to the top.

We started our hike in the morning around 9AM local time and soon found that the first section was steeper than expected.

I was about to give up, but after some encouragement from my wife decided to continue, knowing that will take longer than expected. After half hour we already started to have some nice views:

Some other minutes and we arrived to an opening/glade:

We took a short break, ate something, listen to some birds and started to hike again.

The sky was getting cloudy but it was warmer than average for this period of the year

We found some flowers

After some (many) breaks …

we arrived close to Piatra Sugaului, but there was not a very good place to install my fishpole antenna.

So we decided to go to a nearby hill/summit (Criminis) that was very close.
Arriving there, I started to install my vertical 1/4 lambda fishpole antenna

as the weather was getting worse

I got some cell phone signal and spotted myself and Mike, G6TUH, was the first one to reply my call at 12:00 UTC.
A small pileup started and managed to get 22 QSO in a bit over 10 minutes, when it started to rain and XYL and others asked me (a few times) to pack and start our descent.

This was my first SOTA activation that I have to leave without working every chaser I could hear, but didn’t wanted to get XYL angry.

We started our descent and the light rain soon stopped, leaving just some clouds behind

Who said that going down is easier than going up ??

In total our hike was about 7hours, 16km (10 miles) with over 1000m elevation ascent.

73,
Petronel
YO8SEP/P

2 Likes
2

Thank you for sharing your adventure on here with us.
Love the photos too

M3FEH :slight_smile:

3

Yeap… sometimes the initial planning just don’t work. And please remeber what I wrote after our SOTA Marathon: 1. the timings MUST be relaxed, and 2. read carefully the level curves on the map. BUT don’t worry, be happy: the next activation will be better, it’s almost sure :smile:

BTW, reading what happens to you remembers me one of my OE activations two years ago. After exactly 4 QSO’s I heard a raising rumour of the grass on the other side of the mountain. Lucky me, I know EXACTLY what it means. After 3 seconds, the wind was hitting my position with 100km/h. I had only the time to left the PTT and catching the fishpole. It was the single occasion seeing the fishpole making an quarter of circle curve due to the wind. Of course, it starts raining and I found myself in a difficult situation: if I leave the fishpole, I will never see it again, taken by the wind and lost in some deep gap. And if I stay, my (still) working transceiver placed few meters away will make a shortcircuit due to the rain. Finally, I managed to put the fishpole down to the ground towards the transceiver, hold it with one foot and in the mean time packing the transceiver, the batteries and the tuner inside my waterproof rucksack with both hands. Useless to say how wet I was half hour later when I reach the shelter. But the equipment was saved.

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