ZL3CC Memorial Sota Day report and some photos.
Well this activation nearly didn’t happen for me as I almost left home without my battery. It was not a good omen as in my haste to pack the battery I left my water bottle on the garage bench, so ended up with about a one mug sized flask of Coffee to keep me going for the morning.
View from Mt.Randall Looking South
I also forgot to pick the pens up of the car seat so had no pen to do my paper logs with. This ended up ok as it forced me to use Peter, VK3ZPF’s VK port-a-log for logging for the first time. I use it for spotting and love it but just never got around to using the logging feature. It worked great and I may get a small tablet for future use and ditch the paper logging.
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Ft-857 and single lever paddle by Larry N0SA
My chosen Summit was my favourite Mt.Randall VK6/SW-039. With the road improvements around Perth, it is now possible for me to get to the car park In just a little over an hour. it was an early start, out of bed at 05:45 local and on the road 30 mins later. It was a cool morning leaving home about 7C but was a lot colder down near where I parked the car at 2C. It was a lovely sunny morning though but hiking up to the Summits my hands were feeling the cold. I arrived on the Summit just at 00:00 UTC and it took me a little while to set up and try to sort some issues out. The antenna tuner kept cycling and did not want to tune my vertical antenna on 20 meters. I tried swapping some leads around but it didn’t really fix the issue. Another gremlin which curtailed my operation as I didn’t want to call CQ too much and maybe end up damaging the radio.
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View from Mt.Randall looking West.
Conditions to ZL seemed poor but some of the VK stations were good signals.I did manage to bag 2 ZL Summit stations ZL2ATH and ZL1BYZ, I also worked 3 VK Summit Stations VK2NU VK2IO and VK3BYD. Only other station worked were VK5WG VK1MA and VK3SQ. With only 8 stations in the log, it won’t break any records but was still a very enjoyable sunny but cool spring morning. All stations worked were on 20 metres apart from John ZL1BYZ which was on 17 metres.
It was nice to get out and honour Andrew ZL3CC which was the main idea of the morning.
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Grass Tree
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Parrot Bush, nice flower but terrible stuff to walk through.
John VK6NU/P VK6/SW-039 Mt.Randall.
