I will be in Paphos, Cyprus from October 11-14 for a conference, and on the 15th I will be driving back to Larnaca and I hope to explore a couple SOTA activations that day. I might also be able to get away one evening for a SOTA activation closer to Larnaca.
Is anybody in Cyprus interested in going out to some of these spots, or any advice?
Given their relative ease and distance from military bases, I was planning to do
5B/CY-002 Madari
5B/CY-003 Papousta
I also was looking for one that might work for an afternoon/evening trip from Paphos, if there are any suggestions! Maybe 5B/CY-035 Mazi looks like my kind of activation, and 5B/CY-005 Moutti tis Tremethousaras looks like a nice hike!
I will bring a QS modded for 2m CW in case any locals would like to chase! I am also a BKG member for those who might be interested in being the first member in 5B.
I was in Paphos 10 month ago and activated all of your list, except one, which I tried, but was defeated by stormy weather.
My first comment is beware of the drive times! There are some modern roads, but a lot of very narrow old ones that take a lot longer to drive on than you might imagine.
Papousta is steep on a narrow path, I had quite a time getting down from my high point in a storm… very steep and slippery.
There are several options around Pathos; those close to Larnaca are not as easy to get to. Check out my blog reports from this year and 2023 at DD5LP (dot) com, operating as 5B/VK2JI/P.
Enjoying my time here. Spending more time doing non-radio things, but I was able to get a POTA activation at petra tou romiou, a lovely site!
I was having serious issues with my KX2’s ATU, and found I had to hold the wire in my hand to get my SWR down to 2.5:1. Weirdly, bypassing the tuner via software settings didn’t really work either. I turned the power down and got a good 20 QSOs one-handed.
Turns out, the solder joints for the wires to the connector from the ATU board to the main board finally failed - all the vibrations from 10 years of use finally did that in. I connected the jumper from the BNC connector directly to the main board (my antenna is resonant anyhow!) and it looks like I’m back in business for the SOTA peaks this Thursday! Looking forward to it, resting a bit easier now that the antenna issues are resolved.
The plan is still to activate CY-002 and CY-003 Thursday morning but that depends on how sketchy the scramble on Papoutsa turns out to be!
Sorry to hear about the radio issues, but glad to see you got to operate from POTA CY-0005 Petra Tou Romiou, the beach also counts as beaches on the air BOTA-37815 Aphroditie’s Rock Beach.
I hope the problem is now fixed with the patched radio so you can make plenty of contacts from the SOTA peaks - it looks like the effect of the recent solar storms are now abating and the SFI is going up and the Kp index down, so try 20 & 17m early morning could get you contacts back into the states.
