Saturday 2 May 2026 saw me take my hourglass antenna to another hike in summit. VK3/VN-013 Mt Despair is located about 66 km from Melbourne in a eucalyptus forest with a clearing at the summit, a fire spotter tower and a small helipad. Access to the summit is via an MVO track of about 4km, rising up 164m from the locked gate. My pack weight for the ascent was 12.45 kg and the starting temperature was 19.8°C.
This was my fifth activation of Mt Despair, and I was using the 2m hourglass antenna, FT817, and 100-Watt linear amplifier. The amplifier had suffered some damage in transit with the SSB.CW/FM toggle switching breaking. This caused an unwanted two second delay when switching from TX back to RX. The PTT TX keying from the FT817 no longer worked, but QSOs could still be made, 
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I logged 14 QSOs on 2m SSB ranging from 45 to 183 km. I also logged six HF QSOs before packing up and walking back to my car.
The second summit for the day was VK3/VN-012 Mt Mitchell a drive-up summit about 8km across the valley, but a 28 km drive on good quality bush roads.
At Mt Mitchell I repaired the linear amplifier by removing the broken switch and twisting two wires together, restoring the remote PTT TX keying function.
Mt Mitchell is also located in a eucalyptus forest, but the SOTA summit is surrounded by trees without a view. Setting up on the ground, I logged six QSOs using the hourglass antenna including S2S with @VK3JBL at VK3/VT-002 and S2S with @VK3YY at VK3/VE-237. Then, after not getting any answer to my CQ calls for 15 minutes, I swapped the hourglass for a 5 element Diamond A144S5 Yagi, using the same coax cable. I rotated the Yagi in various directions, called and called, and worked nobody. After 15 minutes I heard a station trying to come back to me but despite much effort and rotating the Yagi for the best signal I couldn’t make out who the station was. I quickly swapped back to the hourglass antenna, aimed roughly in the direction that I had last heard the difficult station and promptly worked Geoff @VK3SQ with 41 each way.
I finished on 2m SSB with one further contact into Melbourne making a total of eight 2m SSB QSOs, ranging from 58 to 184 km.
I logged eight HF QSOs during my last 10 minutes before heading home. The antenna for HF was an inverted L with an L match designed by VK3YE from his YouTube channel.
