I’m not used to activating in the middle of the working week but I still have a few ‘use them or lose them’ annual leave days to take. Rather than wasting them all raking leaves in the middle of December, I spent some of them activating Ben Gorm EI/IW-011 last Thursday.
After a very foggy start leaving home, I wasn’t entirely sure which summit I was going to be able to activate safely. Fortunately, heading west, the skies cleared and by the time I reached Leenane at the the head of Killary Harbour, it was looking like a perfect day for Ben Gorm. The tourist car park at Asleagh Falls is the standard starting point for this one. The ascent to the 700m summit takes just under 2 hours. On the first stretch from the car park you are shepherded upwards between two barbed wire fences over wretched boggy ground, but once past this, the going is pretty good. Once you reach the summit plateau, there is still about 1.5km easy hike to the activation zone.
Equipment: KX2 at 10 W, doublet antenna on 7m Spiderbeam pole. I made 63 QSO’s (40, 20 and 10m), mainly CW. Band conditions were pretty good with 10m open to NA earlier than I was expecting. An 8km round trip in a leisurely 6 hours - just about right for a short November day activation.
73, John
