I decided after booking our Holiday to Portugal that I would at least try a SOTA Activation. I knew it would have to be an easy climb in to AZ from the car parking spot, as these days its all I have. So I chose the one closest to our holiday hotel in Olhao, which was CT/AL-003.
My second difficult decision was I would only be able to take Handhelds with me, so it would have to be VHF and UHF FM only. I packed my E92D with some repeaters locally to have play with during my stay and spare battery, plus Standard Rubber Duck.
Today was my choice to go and see what happened, being a Sunday and me driving on the “wrong” side of the road, my choice of day was good especially once we started our accent. I used my Garmin GPS to ensure I was parking below the AZ enough to be able to walk in with my backpack.
I expected not to qualify, as I did not think many locals would be on especially on 2m FM? But as luck would certainly have it, my 1st contact was with CT1CRP Jose Luis, we swopped reports and I had one contact in my log. I was struggling for a few minutes, when Luis came back and said give his friends a few minutes to get back to their shacks and we would be okay for the contacts list to grow.
After a good gulp of H2O and a Banana I started shouting again and sure enough Luis had rounded up contacts coming back to me for the next 20 mins or so.
4 in the log, I would first like to say to Jose Luis a BIG thank you for keeping me company while I got the others ( CT5IOW/M, CT1CGX/P, CT1CAG/M) and for his assistance in helping me get the 4 qualifying QSO’s.
My first ever Qualified SOTA Summit outside of UK. Yippee. Elaine and I then headed back to car and straight to Restaurant Dana in Moncarapacho for a delightful Lunch.
Thanks to the Algarve for a very successful day, best 73 Tony & Elaine