OK, no worries Kevin. Glad you heard me on 10m - I called there a while from my 4th. summit DL/AM-001 Peissenberg with no response, so I moved to 15m and 20m before it got too cold and dark. I only ran 5W on all of the summits, with either a linked or Off-Centre-Fed dipole at 6 meters AGL.
Although I managed all four summits DL/AM-176 Rentschen, DL/AM-177 Kirnberg, DL/AM-178 Ammerleite and DL/AM-001 Peissenberg, it was not without some “Challenges”…
I had hoped to keep the first three very easy and fast just operating on 40m with the vertical on a tripod. It was not to be. I found out at my first summit (Rentschen), that there was an Italian SSB contest on 40m - so there were NO free frequencies and any that seemed like a free frequency were splattered across by the over modulated 3KW+ station 2 KHz away! So I decided to switch to 20m on the vertical only to find the SWR on 20m was horrible (it had been 1.3:1 when I tested it on the antenna analyser two days previously). So I had to unpack the mast and linked dipole, which I had luckily with me as a backup. All of this added to the time on the first summit meaning I lost the time that I thought I had spare as I had set off 30 minutes earlier than planned.
At the next summit, Kernberg, I managed to bog my car while parking. Luckily the summit is next to a farm and the farmer (a real Bavarian gentleman) pulled me out with his tractor. So summit number two ran over my time scheduled.
By the time I got to my third summit, Ammerleite, time was still slipping away and on this summit apart from the fibreglass pole repeatedly coming down when I was trying to put the OCF dipole up everything went OK but once I finished and packed up, I was very short on time to get to number four, Peissenberg.
When I arrived I found that a large piece of the forest where I used to fasten one end of the dipole into, had been cut down. There were also more people at this (easy to get to) summit that I have seen here before. I found an alternate anchorage point for the dipole and then set-up fairly smoothly however the extra people around, several wanting to know what I was doing, also took some time out of the schedule. Some how I managed to get on air just 5 minutes late.
All in all a trying day of SOTA activations but enjoyable as well.
For those chasers I didn’t hear, I apologise but with the QRM and time restrictions I simply couldn’t get back to you. Thanks to those chasers who worked hard to work me on as many of the summits as possible, Manuel EA2BT (one of the few calls where I rember the name) and Mick M0MDA both managed to contact me on all but the first summit, where the QRM on 40m was horrible from the contest, Carolyn G6WRW had a remarkable signal from her mobile and contacted me on two of the summits as did Don G0RQL, Robert SP8RHP, Bill G4WSB and Leonel CU3EJ. It’s really nice to have contacts with the same chasers from multiple summits. It’s also nice to hear the regular chasers each time I go out. It really makes one feel part of the SOTA “family”.
73 Ed DD5LP.
(I will now move this thread from Activation Reports / Pre-planning to Activation Reports propper).