Last week, my partner and I went for a wee holiday to Dublin for a couple of days. She’d lived there about twenty years back, and when she suggested a wee walk round the Howth Coastal Path, I was only too happy to agree. I even helpfully suggested we take a route that would take us back to the DART station over the high point at Ben of Howth, because there were surely some nice views of the city that we could sit and look at for a wee while as a good excuse for a breather. That it also happened to also be the location of SOTA summit EI/IE-072 was just a coincidence, honest…
Being that we’d planned to go out midweek in the early part of the day, I was a wee bit worried about being able to drum up enough contacts, so in advance I’d put out an alert, messaged some friendly locals, put a shout on the SOTA Ireland facebook page, and even looked up a couple of local repeaters should the simplex bit of the 2m spectrum run dry. We were hand luggage only, so that meant being limited to the one 2m handy (FT-270) and the RH-770 telescopic whip, so any thoughts of beaming across the sea into G or GW were probably on hold.
The walk round the coastal path was very pleasant, if a wee bit busy in places. If anything, the hardest bit was pulling up from the main path towards the “Summit” car park - not on account of the steepness (which was moderate), but the fact that a coachload of tourists had just been emptied out at said car park and were now on their way down the path to get their money shot of the lighthouse.
With a wee bit of wandering up through some very fancy houses, we eventually caught a wee network of paths that led us to the top of Ben of Howth itself. The high point’s marked with a concrete trig point co-located at a large tower flinging out various flavours of RF - I was glad to have had the FT-270 with me. I found a slightly comfortable bit of rock to perch my bum on just a few metres away, stuck the antenna on, and started calling CQ… and calling, and calling, and calling.
Not only was this my first time operating in a foreign land with my fairly recently-acquired CEPT-happy full licence, it was also the first time my girlfriend had been along on an activation with me, or in fact heard me operating on the radio at all. “Usually this is the bit where I’m having to negotiate my way through a stack of stations all queueing up to make contact” I assured her, as I continued CQing into the void.
Thankfully, after a wee while, the embarrassing silence was broken by the welcome sound of Ian @EI3LH a few kilometres to the north. Ian was very kind and did his very best to try and help rustle up as many local contacts as he could, despite most sensible people being gainfully employed at 11:30 on a Wednesday morning. Eventually, I did manage contacts with the similarly-callsigned @EI2LH, and then @EI9HAB, but then things went a wee bit quiet again.
By this point, I was already about ten minutes into a “do you mind if I just give it five more minutes” with an increasingly cold and unamused looking partner, and a big rain shower had just started to roll over us, so I decided that it was probably a good time to stop pushing my luck and go QRT for the day. Three contacts wasn’t enough to gain any points for the day, but it was only a wee one-pointer hill anyway, and the walk round the coast path had been a fairly pleasant wee day out already.
I’d just like to reiterate my thanks to Ian @EI3LH for his tireless efforts to drum up any available operators, and my apologies for not being able to hang about long enough to pick up any more chasers. Guess that just gives me another excuse to nip back for another wee visit some time!