Wow. It’s a nice hill I enjoyed the walk. I had near complete snow coverage with only the Heather popping out. I had a very lucky day. I did fancy having a go at GM/SS-105 opposite it but I’m not fit enough to do both. In addition the snow coverage on the other hill was worse as it’s in shadow. I may try to have a go from the other side using the wind farm road.
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Hi Paul
As Stephan wrote and I´m totally agree: ¨About the conditions: When I started with SOTA, after a long ham radio break, I also studied all kind of solar data. It can be helpful, but IMHO they are less reliable than a bad weather prediction 
. Of course it’s nice to have an SFI >200, as it is now. When I started with SOTA it was mostly below 85! So, in general, I don’t care anymore about the data, since I never had a problem to get enough contacts when using HF.¨
In my case 2 years ago I started to activate some summits at afternoom/evening looking for EU. During January 2021 in my evening activation I had some nice pileups from EU with a SFI below 100 I remember very well the great signals from EU. Yesterday I activated between 0730-0830 UTC (local time 1630-1730) and with a SFI over 200 the signals from EU were very hard to catch.
73!
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I take the approach of make sure it is logged correctly at the time in my log. Then when I upload my log and click “See who chased me” and someone believes they have chased me but they are not in my log, I can be confident it is not a logging mistake on my part.
For SSB (with lack of rbn) it is clearly more difficult to be sure how well your transmission is being propagated. However, with CW, when the doubt comes into my mind that I have few replies, I look at SOTLAS from the summit and see I am being picked up by rbn all across Europe. I would argue time of day is a big factor in SOTA chaser activity. I perceive a general drop in chaser activity post-lunch time on HF (my perception is weekend mornings are peak time). Only once have I ever really struggled with band conditions and that turned out to be a solar storm causing what seemed to be an RF blackout. My first doubt would always be something not right with my equipment.
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