We have had a slight hiccup and have had to change the location of the fall campout this year. Lake Winfield Scott’s campground is having infrastructure issues which won’t be repaired in time and we have moved the campout to the Lake Rabun Campground a bit further to the east. The good news is that this campground has a lot more campsites than LWS with many still reservable. If you have been on the fence on attending due to the lack of reservable campsites, get down off of the fence and make that reservation!
Like all of our W4 campouts, come when you can and leave when you have to. We encourage everyone to show up - activators, chasers and newbies. It is always a great way to take a deep dive into activating SOTA summits with so many experienced activators willing to share the trail and summits with hams new to SOTA.
The campground is located just sound of Joe Mountain in the bottom center of the map.
We are just a few days away from our fall campout and it looks like the weather will finally start to feel like fall this week. Ought to be good camping weather in the north Georgia mountains. I look forward to seeing everyone again and there are still plenty of campsites available for those waiting until the last minute to make a decision.
Several SASQ members are planning on being there Saturday evening. What campsite(s) are you setting up at? We are going to be at #67 in Loop 2. We will also be checking our Discord.
Sorry for not seeing this last week, but I’m glad y’all were able to drop by for a bit on Saturday. It was a great weekend with mild temps with lots of activations of rarely activated (or unactivated) summits. There was a bit of rain over the weekend, but thankfully it was only when we were at camp and not out on the summits. Thanks to everyone for making this such a great event!
What a fantastic event! We had 30+ ops and family members at the potluck and had a lot of newer SOTA ops attend! I want to say a special thank you to Pat @WW4D for organizing the event and for his excellent last-minute plan changes due to water issues at our original campground.
It was a real treat to catchup up with old friends and meet new ones. I can’t wait until the Spring campout in May 2024!
This year’s campout hit the usual level of excellence. Always happy to see familiar faces as well as new participants (please come back!). Nice that the wx behaved; I saw some summits from a totally different perspective once dry ;-)! Tnx to all for the S2S, great pot luck contributions and general camaraderie. Looking forward to Spring 2024.
N5FY, his 4 y/o harmonic (Jude) and I ran into Allen (AG4VA) on the summit of Rocky Mountain. At one point, I think all three of us were on the air within the AZ.
N5FY and I shared a campsite. He brought an entire antenna building station with him. The canopy of the tent even had a built-in spool of 26 gauge wire!
As you might imagine, many a tall summit tale was told around this campfire. Not pictured was the massive amount of food under the potluck tent Saturday night.
Already looking forward to the next W4 SOTA campout! What a blast!
My station here in DC struggles to hear anything over the heavy urban noise so I seldom chase from here, but I was motivated to try since I’ve met a number of you in person. As I was telling Chris N8PEM, oddly enough 30 meters was the best band for me for the campout. I had expected to be under the skip for 20 but 40 was surprisingly poor also. My guess is the antennas most people used for 40m wound up primarily with NVIS takeoff emission and I was a little too far away for that, but who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
