I these days, after I’ve got back to full time work and I’ve got divorced, having the kids with me 50% of the time, I’m not having lately much time to prepare new unique SOTA expeditions and I’m mostly doing our local summit Mt. Ezkaba as a way to do some work out and play some SOTA as well.
I did it on Saturday, October 31st with just my Yaesy FT-470 and a dualband colinear mobile antenna. Being in light mode without a rucksack, the hike took me 32 minutes and I think it was the fastest I’ve ever done. I activated very shortly because I had my wrist watch in UTC and made the mistake of not having in mind that we changed to winter time last weekend and thinking the local time was still 2 hours more than UTC, so only made 2 QSOs on 2m FM and went QRT to descend and get back home for lunch. My 2 only chasers were Manuel @EA2DT and Jorge @EA2LU. Thank you mates!
Today, sunday, November 1st, I hiked with my usual rucksack and the hike took me 36 minutes, which is not too bad.
I wanted to setup with my 21.5m long wire in order to try to do some QSOs on 80m for the Challenge, but I was trying to setup the wire as an inverted vee, the wires got slightly tangled and when trying to untangle them, a bit too much effort was applied to the already extended telescopic fishing rod and one of the sections, which had slightly cracked some time ago and I had already repaired, didn’t resist the effort and broke. This made me change plans and I had to finally setup with a much shorter version of my telescopic fishing rod and my 10m long wire instead of the 21.5m long one.
I only worked 20m CW and I logged 90 QSOs in about 2h 45minutes, which included 4 S2S and 1 DX USA.
After QRT, I managed to put all the broken fishing rod back in and descend as I always do using it as my second walking pole. Once at home, I have managed to repair the broken fishing rod and although it’s got a bit shorter, it will still serve me well in a good number of activations.
I think I bought this fishing rod back in 2009 for 14€, so it’s really giving me a great deal of service for that money.
Thanks dear chasers for your calls and QSOs.
I’ll be looking forward to copying you all again soon from a summit.
73,
Guru