I’m delighted to let you know that I’ve been able to arrange another Upper Park GW/MW-032 activation day. This is a rare opportunity to access and activate such a challenging private summit, and I’m thrilled to share it with you.
After more than 18 months of planning, we now have a confirmed date:
Saturday, 11th April 2026
We’ll meet at around 08:30 (UK time), walk up to the summit together, and enjoy approximately one hour to activate. I will send meeting location and further details nearer the time.
If you’d like to take part, please send me a PM via the SOTA Reflector messaging system only, and I’ll add your name to the list. Please make sure you include your email address in the message you send me.
Important note: Places are limited to 20 participants, on a first come, first served basis. Once the list is full, I’ll take up to 3 reserves and update this thread to confirm when all places have been allocated.
There will come a cost with this activation of £25 per candidate. This will go towards a chosen charity by Powis Estate.
Looking forward to sharing this special activation day with many of you.
Thanks for organising Ben @GW4BML. As you know high on my list to complete mid-wales and Wales Marilyn’s. Very sadly I plan to be operating in Japan and so best I can do is chase !
It’s strange! Ten years ago I wrote to the estate proposing exactly this - well almost! Mine was 25 activators donating £20 each I think! I tried to sell it as a way to significantly reduce the amount of access requests they received while at the same time raising £500 for the Welsh Air Ambulance - Powis Castle’s nominated charity at that time.
Got nowhere!
My opening came during the pandemic when Lord Powis himself read and replied to my communication, rather than his staff.
Anyway, I always thought this was a good idea, so I am glad the concept has been proven. It just took the addition of the @GW4BML aura I guess! (Still Mid Wales’ highest profile TV personality since BBC Countryfile in 2022…)
I was lucky enough to take part in the last group of activation of this summit. Everything was well organised by Ben, and it was great putting faces to some familiar callsigns.
Highly recommended for anyone keen to tick this one off the list.
For folks taking part in this weekend’s Upper Park activation, I have a set of external HF bandpass filters if anyone would like to use one to minimise QRM between stations.
I’ll pop them all in the car, but if you’d like to use one, they have 2 * SO-239 connectors - please bring your own patch lead and coax adapters as required for your radio!
(They expect to see 50R on input and output, so they’re best used with resonant antennas, or between the rig and ATU, rather than on the antenna side of the ATU. Should be good for 100W, which I assume will not be a limitation anyone will hit.)
In my experience, there was minimal interference between the stations when I went with a group to activate the summit. The AZ allows for quite a spread of stations across the summit. Having the option of filters however is the icing on the cake.
I will be in Cornwall on Saturday and hopefully will be out portable looking for the Complete, most likely to come on 40m due to terrain my end. I am also hoping to get out to work Mike G7HEM on Caeliber Isaf GW/MW-031 later in the day for another Complete, but that isn’t guaranteed.
Ah if I knew you needed the complete I would have let you known I was activating it on Monday, but to be fair I could not do 40m as the band was full with contest activity.
I’m planning to do Upper Park on 80m as well if you have capability, which may increase the chance of getting it.
We are staying near Dolgellau for the weekend so hope to be up a hill at a suitable time (wx?) so please keep an eye (or ear?) on 2m (145 425/450/475.. wherever I can find) and 70cm (433.475) for me. We had a great time when we went on this trip a few years ago. Tx to Ben for all the superb organisation once again. Good luck.
Well, for me 80m was THE band, so many thanks for running it Jared. Signals weren’t strong between us, but at least we had propagation and your signal was solid. 40m was decidedly poor with lots of very deep QSB and long skip. I listened for everyone that spotted for the band from Upper Park, but ciuldn’t hear anyone.
I had more Q4 reports on my WWFF/POTA activation that I’ve ever had before, with signals ranging from S1 to S7 at best. Just 22 QSOS in 4 hours…. tedious or what? Pretty much everyone seemed to be having similar results. Certainly a day for running a bit of power, which I wasn’t (IC-703 barefoot to a 40m EFHW).
I did think about you needing the complete this morning, so I’m glad you managed to get the complete on 80m with Jared. I found 40m to be very hard work - it took almost 20 minutes to get my first contact on 40m SSB. The only UK station I worked on 40m was GM3ZRT up in Glencoe. The rest were EU, but QSB was making contacts difficult.
23cm was more successful, as I managed a S2S with Peter @MW0PJE
Many thanks Ben and Rob W for organising and shepherding us around. I brought the G90 and end fed hoping that would let me use different bands than the others in the group, I don’t have a tuner for the ft-817 yet. The front end suffered from break though badly.. Still, managed a good QSO into Bulgaria and a S2S on 17m with MW0PJE/P! A couple more on 20m into EU and I ran off to work Vicki on 70cm with the huddle, followed by a daft dash down the hill and back to get the complete. Good to meet Mike GW7HEM, both Robs (MW0WRX and VFC) in person, and the others I neglected to note details of. Hope you all missed the band of hail and snow that followed me home!
Thanks Ben and Rob for organising, we lucked out with the weather with some snow showers towards midday after we have activated it, where myself, M0XJA and M7WUK worked from the comfort of a car to those on Y Golfa who sounded like they were in the thick of it.
Really interesting day both in terms of the summit itself and band conditions, I got a comfortable amount on 80m but it sounds like those who did 40m struggled, good way to test my new antenna build, it was good to note that even moving the antenna around changed the resonance greatly. Great that it got more people to successfully chase the summit. I was also very surprised by the chalet at the summit, very continental.
Our second group activation was Beacon Hill, GW/MW-026, where we got a groundwave QSO with M0PJE on 15m, but also a 15m S2S QSO with M1MAJ at around 70 miles LOS which I was very surprised by.
Sounds like the others who were out also had some interesting times on the other Welshpool summits afterwards.
I noticed that ; at least you marked yourself QRT.
Not only was your spot the last one for the summit that you didn’t visit today, seemingly Kevin, @MW0KXN was the last activator a little over a month ago on on March 7…
Same here, 40 was very long, I hoped that it would shorten during the morning as it often does, but no such luck. That made it a very welcome surprise when I heard Jared on 80m. Thanks for saving the morning for me! After that I was dodging hail showers in the garden.
and so best I can do is chase !
So busy he spotted himself on GW/MW-032 instead of GW/NW-060.
; at least you marked yourself QRT.