Motivation
A visit to my wife’s family in Vitoria and a dry weather allowed me to visit a new summit for me, Mt. Indiagana EA2/VI-015.
Activation date: December 17th 2022
What I wasn’t expectig was to find the Belgium’s Atomium building moved into this summit in Spain!
Driving directions
This mountain is at about 20 minutes drive from the city center of Vitoria.
You can drive and park in the port of Azazeta (890 m. elev.) on road A-132. There is space for about 10 cars.
From this point, you just cross a cattle grid and start walking following a dirt road first.
- Trail length (one way): 3,3 kilometer
- Summit elevation: 1099 m a.s.l.
- Elevation gain: 200m (272 cummulative gain)
The trail is clear although some care is needed not to leave the right way as there are some crosses. The profile is this, a mix of going up and down in the way:
The climb
I was lucky it is not been raining a lot in the last days, otherwise I would expect a much worse muddy trail. The way passes through a bleech and pine forest most part.
At the beggining I could see the destination in the distance. The summit is just hidden behind this other neighbor summit:
As I said, most of the trail runs across a dense forest but at a point I could see the low height fog in the valley.
The summit
As you could expect, the very Summit is also covered with trees, so unfortunatelly, there are no views.
The summit is flat and is marked with a curious mountain mailbox: a small metalic model of the Brussels Atomium:
Well, the similarity is evident,right?
This mailbox was installed here by a local mountain club back in 1960 . I don’t know why they choose this building.
The activation
Today I decided to carry my homebuilt (tr)uSDX. I don’t use it very often, but I thought it would be a bit challenging using it again, and verify it does work all right. I carried 3 x 18650 LiIon batteries.
This time, conscious this would be a summit covered with trees, I carried a short randon wire antenna (9m long plus 4 x 4,2m radials) and the ZM-2 manual tuner.
It wasn’t windy at all and I just laid my fishpole extended over a small tree and extended the wire inverted Vee, no need for guying the mast.
Some care is required not to burn the finals of the (tr)uSDX while tuning the antenna and therefore I powered the rig using its USB port everytime I changed bands, as this way the rig reduces its output power to just 500 miliwatt.
The other main issue is the reduced visibility of the OLED screen, but I shadowed it with my body and managed to see the screen.
I ran on 20m CW first and logged some regular chasers. Among them I was very happy to get a call from @HB9BCB using his wall indoor short doublet antenna with good signals, thanks Heinz! I also got a S2S call from Fabio @IK2LEY.
Later, I installed the headset adaptor cable and I ran on 14 SSB. There I got another two S2S with Marcel @DM3FAM and Chris @DL3EC; thanks! No one complain about my phone audio although I’m aware the (tr)uSDX is not brilliant on SSB.
To end my activation I logged my friend Alf EA4R on 7 CW and to my surprise got a final S2S call from Javi @EA2GM. I closed the log with 29 qso.
Gastronomical tip of the day
To celebrate the success of the working (tr)uSDX and get some energy I took a Christmas desert out of my rucksack.
This one is a small delicate cake called “polvoron” and is wrapped in a silky paper.
The recype of this little cake includes flour, animal fat, sugar, powdered almonds and cinnamon. The texture is quite soft, as this cake easily dissolves into a powdered mix in your mouth.
The origins are dated back in XVI century in Andalusia, and later this Christmas desert extended to the rest of Spain, although the main production remains located in this region (EA7/SE).
Thanks all for the qso.
73 de Ignacio