Or so I was told.
If I missed it, it was my own fault. But armed with this interesting tip, I relieved Marianne of her share of running Liam to Congleton and picking him up, as I wanted a piece of the action from The Cloud G/SP-015. The resulting activation was a big fat fail.
I got to the top and started to set up. It dawned on me that I hadn’t packed a feeder cable for the SOTAbeams SB6 Moxon antenna. Everything back in the rucksack, and back down the hill. Retrieved the required lead and reascended.
Set up and settled down. The brisk breeze evident the first time I reached the summit had disappeared, and in its place came the mozzies. The 50MHz band sounded quite lively - goody! Just to get going, I had a quick exchange with M0GDX on SSB. But it was down in the CW portion where all the action seemed to be.
Then a big problem - my Palm Paddle with Code Cube was keying at over 40wpm! The pot on the Code Cube couldn’t reduce this by much, so I had to dig out the menu card and try and sort out the settings. In 40 horrible minutes while enduring midge attacks, all my attempts to do this failed, including even going through the full reset process. I managed to get it down to about 34wpm, which at least allowed me to make three CW contacts - all with G stations.
By now I had lost so much time that I needed to pack up, descend and pick Liam up. Back at home in Macclesfield, I took the paddle, Code Cube and lead into the shack - and sorted out the issue in seconds. Everything progressed as described in the manual. So much easier in the shack, at a desk, on a comfortable chair, with no time pressures or midge attacks!
Hopefully there will be more 6m afternoon openings this week - and I can get out and partake in them.