Colorado 14er

Hey all, I’m planning on activating Mt. Lincoln early Saturday morning. It’s my first activation so I have a very loose plan.

  1. Climb mountain
  2. Do radio things
  3. Go home

This will be my 6th 14er, so I have the mountaineering part handled. I need plans for the SOTA side of things.

I have a handheld Baofeng, a cool beam antenna and access to 2m and 70cm. I won’t be able to throw signals to Siberia, so I need some local chasers.

Activation points do not stack with multiple bands do they? I will still only receive 10 points if I do contacts on 2m AND 70cm, correct? And if that’s the case, could I do some contacts on 2m, and the rest on 70cm, or do I have to keep the bands consistent?

I could probably hit Denver, Springs, Breck, Pueblo, and possibly Fort Collins. Any chasers vaguely near those areas who want some juicy 14er points, let me know, we can make a plan and show that mountain who’s boss.

You get 10 points if you log 4 unique callsigns on any band and any mode, without using terrestrial repeaters (satellites OK). You can claim points for the summit once per year.

Good luck on your first activation!

-Doug, ND9Q

Having a good antenna goes a long ways (pun intended) towards making contacts. Posting an alert on Sotawatch with your planned summit, eta, and frequencies is a good way to let chasers know your plan. Seeing your alert, chasers may be listening for you on a designated frequency (e.g., 146.52 for 2m fm) but being able to self-spot is also key to making contacts.

Other resources available for discussing activation plans are the Yahoo groups for Colorado Ham14ers and nasota (sota in North America.) There may be other that I’m not aware of.

Depending on the timing of your activation, I may attempt a summit to summit contact from northern Colorado. Good luck, stay safe, and have fun!

73,
Peter KD0YOB

I was going to be on the summit of Lincoln around 7am Saturday morning, I’m going to watch the sunrise up there. If that time works for you, we can make contact. Thanks for the reminder. Once I figure out how to post an alert, I will. I’m also going to post it on some other forums, I need to branch out to reach more local hams!

To post an alert, head over to SOTAwatch and create an account, if you haven’t already (Accounts don’t follow you across the various SOTA sites quite yet). Once logged in, you can click on “new alert” and fill out the form with your call, date, time, summit reference, freqs, etc… Spots work the same way. Just remember that alerts are for the future, and spots are for right now.

There are also some third party smartphone apps for submitting alerts and spots. You can even spot via APRS if you have that capability, and are registered with the APRS>SOTA gateway.

-Doug, ND9Q

Perfect! I submitted it. Thank you for that.

I don’t see it on there. There are a couple common mistakes people make: double check the reference, and make sure everything before the “/” goes in the first box (W0C) and the rest goes in the second box (FR-001). Also, since SOTA started in the UK, dates are in the British-normal DD/MM/YYYY format (30/09/2017). Time should be UTC (1300 if I did my maths correctly).

-Doug, ND9Q

If you will be on the summit at 0700 MTN I’ll be able to chase you from my girlfriends QTH in Broomfield. I climbed Lincoln 20 years ago and plan on Lincoln again this winter as well as Quandary this winter. I climbed quandary on January 20th but had a little frostbite and I was too cold to operate my radio.

I’ll be working my gun shop in Evergreen later in the morning and won’t hear you from there.

There are several chasers in the front range area. Post an alert on sotawatch.org. Get on the 145.145 repeater and introduce yourself and let people know you are activating.

I hope to hear you on 146.520 on Saturday morning! Good luck!

73
Mark N0MTN

I reposted the alert because I didn’t see it. Maybe since my account is new, a mod has to approve it? Either way, I will make every attempt to summit by 0700 and be on 146.520

They don’t need approving and should appear immediately. It’s not appeared because something was incorrect. For some errors you get a nice screen showing the error. If nothing appears and there’s no error page, then the software has spotted something it really doesn’t like and dropped the alert. A possible error that doesn’t get prompted is if you put an apostrophe or quotation character in the comment.

If you swap the date about and enter a malformed date then you get an error page as does entering a non-ham frequency. (I still do this and put 17-cw for 17m when it should be 18-cw!)

Thank you everyone for the help with that. I think my comment was too long. It’s up now. I’ll be aiming for you, N0MTN.

1 Like

I just checked and saw your activation listed. Best wishes for a fun activation!

Appears you may have interesting weather.

73, Fred KT5X (WS0TA)

"KT5X
Appears you may have interesting weather.

73, Fred KT5X (WS0TA)"

Hi Fred,
Yeah…it will be snowing here in Colorado up high the next several days. The snow climbing season has started!! Hopefully, activators will prepare well for the conditions…

73, Brad
WA6MM

My mama didn’t raise a quitter, I’ll be on that mountain with my radio and my dog. 146.52!

My apologies for the failed activation. I made it up Mt. Bross and the winds were about 60 mph. It was 35ish degrees before windchill. . The wind picked up to about 80 mph and knocked me over. I still had to cross a narrow ridge to get to the actual mountain, the wind would have blown me off of that. Safety first, I decided to leave. I wouldn’t have been able to assemble or control my yagi in that wind anyway. I wanted to tell chasers that it wasn’t going to work out so I tried using my whip antenna instead, it didn’t work. My dog and I went down the mountain and went 4 wheeling, we had a heater. We are going to try again, not sure when, but I’ll post another alert.

Hey Robert…at least you made the attempt and got to 14K ft! Great job! The weather is tricky now and the winds can be brutal. My activation today in Colorado was only at 12,335 ft. The wind and temps weren’t too bad so I had a great time. I’ll look for you again soon my friend.

73, Brad
WA6MM

Glad you made the attempt and didn’t push it. Will look for you next time. 73