How many people would be up for trying 10m FM on Wednesday 7th July?
A friend & I will be spending a few days in the Lake District early next month (5th-9th July) where we will be activating several SOTA summits. We are planning a couple of joint activations & a couple of solo activations where we go it alone (primarily to try a couple of S2S contacts). Wednesday 7th is the day that we’ve set aside for our solo activations.
We wanted to try something a little different & the suggestion of 10m FM came up.
My guess is that under normal circumstances calling CQ on the 10m FM calling channel would result in silence, but we are tentatively thinking that we might try a couple of S2S contacts on 10m FM & the hope is that we might be able to drum up a bit of interest from a few locals (or maybe even further afield if the band is open).
We will both be running EFHW verticals, so vertical polarisation will work best (if you are local, not critical if you are using sky wave).
Looking at the statistics, there seem to be a lot of FM contacts & plenty of 10m contacts logged, but I’m guessing that most of those 10m contacts were SSB & most of those FM contacts were on 2m?
Sounds a great idea. I imagine you would get more take-up with a Saturday morning event. That though wouldn’t coincide with your LD plans. How about a trial run this coming Saturday morning? (Especially as I won’t be around to join in on 7th July…).
I’m activating Lambrigg Fell G/LD-046 tomorrow afternoon [Wednesday 7th. July] on most HF bands with CW. Will have KX2 [and HF vertical] and FT817 [the latter with mic] and my homebrew 20/10/6 linked dipole so will give 10m FM a go if I see any spots.
Really sorry for not posing on here sooner folks. Unfortunately the campsite where I was staying had no internet.
From my perspective I’m afraid the idea fell through because I felt a really rough on Wednesday (pounding headache). This meant that I didn’t feel up to climbing any mountains so I spent most of the day lounging around my caravan at the campsite feeling really sorry for myself!
Harley (who was accompanying me) was really stiff from our two previous activations of Helvellyn & Skiddaw, so he wasn’t really up for going solo & activating any hills on Wednesday. Even by Thursday he was still aching so I think I might have pushed him a bit too hard!
Wednesday become a “lazy day of rest” for both of us.
I did however feel better by Wednesday evening & managed a solo activation of Scafell Pike the next day (Thursday).
Essentially I activated the three highest SOTA summits in the Lake District in the space of 4 days, which I’m very proud of…I know some of the more seasoned mountain goats will probably laugh at that (& may have done it in three days or less), but for me that felt like quite an achievement.
Sorry to hear you were feeling rough. It proved worthwhile at my end as there was quite a bit of European sporadic E on 10m. I’ll leave 29.6 on in work for a while, so do put out a call if you have a spare minute or two.