As well as making up antennas for 6 and 10M I’ve been looking at some of the activation statistics for the closer summits.
Whilst I realise that there may be challenges at places like Bishop Wilton Wold and Normanby Top, the totals for contacts made, so far, from these summits for 6 and 10M are as follows.
Yes Dave. There is always interest from chasers in contacting SOTA activations. When the 6/10 Challenge gets underway, there will naturally be additional interest in contacting summits on 50MHz and 28MHz.
As you point out, those two summits have been rather rare on these bands, so you might attract particular interest ahead of the challenge on those frequencies too.
I think I’ll wait for the challenge to start. After all, only one activation per year counts towards my scores, so I’d prefer it was in the challenge period.
The challenge is scored independently of other SOTA awards. Scoring merely extracts 6m & 10m QSOs from the database during the 2 challenge windows and scores them up. So you can visit the same summit many times to activate it for the challenge.
For the activator awards, you only get to score points once per year and you only get bonus points (should the summit qualify) once per year.
And these are independent of the S2S award.
Andy’s maxim: work everything, log everything and the database will score it all.
Joking apart, I’d agree with the sentiment. Given that my Amateur Radio time is limited, I do have to apportion what I do and make the most of it that I can.
I’ve been wanting to get to Cloud and/or Gun but I’ve not been in a suitable place with enough time just lately, so I’ll see what I can do later in the year. Again, probably within the 6M/10M challenge time.
As part of the planning, I guess we have to address the thorny issue of which transmission modes to use?
Personally, despite the mainly FM bias that I’ve had so far this year, I do prefer CW. However, I know it’s not every ones favourite mode, so I will take a microphone. I’ve even bought one for the KX3 (I can use a headphone set but decided that the ‘proper’ job would be a good insurance policy) so SSB is now possible.
If I know in advance that people wanted FM/SSB I’d be prepared to allocate some activation time to those modes as well as CW.
I lay claim to three of the six contacts made from G/TW-004 Bishop Wilton Wold on 50MHz, Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina were worked using my 817 whilst sat on the floor using my Miracle Whip!
It is well known that I am not a fan of CW, but when six is in full cry with an Es opening the SSB QRM has to be experienced to be believed, it can make a major phone contest on twenty sound like a walk in the park, with 5 watts or so CW might work better, I dunno. I, though, will persevere with SSB and hope for a few multi-skip openings to NA and the Caribbean or even SA. Trouble is most of the transatlantic openings seem to come in the evening when all good hill walkers are in the pub!
The auroral distortion on 6m ssb is nowhere near as bad as on 2m making qso’s much easier to complete. In the case of Auroral Es, there is even less distortion, sometimes none at all. You would only know you’re working AuEs when you look at the solar indices (k index in particular) and time of day.
Well, I only have 13 years of experience, I just missed the great F2 openings of the last sunspot cycle, but the big transatlantic multi-hop events that I have witnessed were later than 1500, I particularly remember one that finally faded out about midnight…though I probably missed some as my day job would have got in the way before I retired!
10m DX magnet constructed, that was easy. Matched to 50Ohms, that was hard.
I wish I’d had the club’s HP VNA with me in the garden, that would have made it so much easier. What antenna is it? Well that depends if it works or not, I’ll tell what it is if it’s no good. If it works well I may keep it a secret!
Having built it using the MFJ259, I connected an 817 to find 10m dead as was 12m. Typical. However, by later on in the afternoon I could copy SV5TEN and YM7KK beacons at good strength. Not much else about. Local CBers were loud and foul mouthed, triple nickel was dead like most of 10m. Perhaps it’s a rubbish antenna after all.
