After several windy days, we had a calmed and sunny one, so I went up to our local summit for some SOTA fun activating in the beginning of the afternoon.
Thinking on possibly having some trans-Atlantic QSOs, I didn’t set up by the mountaineering mailbox, but further to the West of the summit area.
The very summit and the trig point can’t be reached, as they are in a restricted military area, so all we can do is finding our place ouside of the restricted area making sure we don’t go beyond the 25 vertical meters.
My set up was a sloper 10m long endfed wire to a 9:1 unun from which a 5m long counterpoise wire was extended on top of the bushes.
The 7m long telescopic fishing rod was tied to a bush trunk like this:
Here you can see the sloper:
And this is the point where the antenna wire meets the 9:1 unun:
I had wanted to work other bands, but 20m provided such good fun that I stayed there all the time. Most of it on CW, but I also made a few SSB QSOs before QRT.
Not having had any lunch yet, I decided to QRT by 14h30z pack up and descend.
All in all 39 QSOs, 2 S2S, 1 DX USA, 1 DX Canada and 1 DX Indonesia.
You can see it on the map:
It was a very nice activation with great DX contacts.
Thanks dear chasers for your calls and QSOs. I’ll be looking forward to copying you all again soon from a SOTA.
73,
Guru
