Well done Jace great report and photos,
I agree with Andy “He who did nowt never made a mistake.”
I am amazed with some of the HB9 chasers who seem to be out every day, I could not do that because after evert Activation I I have something to mend, be it a quad tendon, aerials, masts, coax, ft857 memory loss, or simply wet muddled kit. As others have said beware, Sota is very addictive, but should you want advice it is FREE, just ask.
David
G0EVV
Post script:
Look after your chasers, we would have a lonely existence just working S2S.
Its reassuring and quite entertaining to hear other people’s experiences and good to know that even the seasoned goats and sloths out there also make mistakes. I wonder who can claim the most comical of SOTA blunder? Viki @M6BWA forgetting the radio in the first place is brilliant!
I like the advice Andy @MM0FMF received, might have to internalize it for future use: “the man who never made a mistake never made anything of value.”
It’s a lovely wee walk up there, good choice for a first HF. I’m the opposite, I’ve never used my Baofeng. I’m in Crieff and rarely have any trade when I have tried it so I always forget to bring it. To be honest I’m not entirely sure how to! Get on to a calling freq and then shift up? One for the autumn for me maybe.
Well done on qualifying this summit, your first it seems. Lots of things can go wrong, the main one is forgetting something, either leaving it in the car or at the home QTH!
I failed some years ago in the Yorkshire Dales when I was there in very cold condx. I was using an FT-857 myself in those days with the same combo, the 14.8v 4S LiPO battery. No problem until the temperature was a few degrees below zero, then the radio would not turn on! I reached but couldn’t activate G/NP-031 and did not have a 2m handie with me, so there was no activation. Don’t ask me why the over voltage was a problem but only when the radio was very cold. Frank G3RMD kindly sent me a zener diode to drop the fully charged 15v battery supply down to around 13.5v. No problem then. The same day I got stuck in snow on my way to Dodd Fell (with my standby 3S1 LiPo!). I grounded my FWD car in deep snow on Cam Houses Road. After a three hour plus wait for recovery I was towed out backwards by a guy in a Suzuki Vitara LWB 4X4. This was my worst every SOTA day out…
Other errors and mistakes have happened but not big enough to not qualify the summit as far as I can recall. Started activating in 2005 in Scotland. 1310 activations so far and I am still going out from time to time and chasing activators for a few hours on and off every day I am at home.
Phil @G4OBK That activation sounds like an absolute nightmare!
Thanks for the heads up about over voltage when it gets cold. It was the battery I had from an old camera so just making do. I have not taken it out in the cold weather yet, but have considered wiring in a buck converter into the loop to bring the voltage down a touch as I have some of those lying around.
Its a great radio especially since the recent changes to the licensing mean I can run it at 25watts! Although I don’t run it more than 5 normally on VHF.
Today in epic WX after bike&hike to the summit of Carn a’Mhaim GM/ES013 I setup my KX2 and it would not send when I started keying the paddle. Sorry no sidetone but it would go into TX but no RF. Now I had been playing with some settings and was sure I had reset them. But Off I went looking at Key seetings and Vox and …
10mins later getting nowhere I thought… try the Mic and just do SSB. I pulled the Mic out of its bag and went to plug it in only to find the key was plugged into the Mic. Oh I did swear very loud. I blame the exertion and visual overload for such a daft mistake.
It also helps if you put the mike and headphones in the correct sockets - I was foolish enough to make them the same on my audio/ptt connector box. (The ptt is different.)
So it turns out after all this I managed a catastrophic failure yesterday on a dog walk and impromptu 2M activation on East Lomond [GM/SS-198].
After the short walk and a bit of foraging en route to the summit I realised that after re-packing my radio earlier in the day that I had completly forgetten the PTT mic as well as my HT.
I scanned the bands to see what was going on but didn’t hear any CQs or nets so settled for a little bit of FM radio.
After the failed SOTA activation we decended with a happy dog, a handful of mushrooms and some 5,9+++ signals from the BBC.
