First snow in the Lake District this year?

I got out early this morning for an activation of Loughrigg Fell G/LD-047. The WX forecast was for rain from around 10am.

This was quite an achievement as last night we were celebrating a posthumous birthday of a good friend we lost earlier in the year. The Bootleggers venue has reopened in Kendal - a popular spot for live music, although I’ve never been previously. Last night was a band called Antiks a heavy rock/metal band who were as loud as I can remember experiencing, we had to retire to the main bar area after a short while!

As I was activating the weather started coming in over Crinkle Crags and as I left I noticed that there was a dusty white covering of the higher fells, as predicted. It was around 4 degC at lake level, so probably just above freezing on the fell. With no appreciable wind it was quite pleasant, except for cold hands.

Thanks to all the chasers, I took the FT-817ND and the MiniPA50 amp for a spin with the SOTABeams Band Hopper IV. I couldn’t work out whether there was an issue with the amp, I ended up plugging the 4S LifePo4 direct into the FT-817ND for 5w and disconnected the amp. Should really have tested this combination in the warmth of the shack as I’d not used them for a while.

From a tech perspective I’m trying to use Hyprland under the Wayland graphics system running in Arch Linux. It is a tiling window manager that uses a lot of keyboard shortcuts, it is taking some getting used to!

I’m also using FLEcli but for some reason the mysota keyword isn’t resulting in an entry in the resulting ADI file, need to look at that.

Mark. M0NOM.














TIME CALLSIGN BAND MODE RST RSR OPERATOR SIG REF
08:57 DL8DXL 20m SSB 59 57 Fred
08:58 F5PYI 20m SSB 59 59 Laurent
08:59 DG0JMB 20m SSB 59 57 Joerg
08:59 SQ9CWO 20m SSB 59 57 Jan
09:00 DL1DVE 20m SSB 59 57 Thomas
09:02 EA3ARP 20m SSB 55 52 Joan
09:09 M7PNN 40m SSB 58 58 Paul BOTA B/G-1159
09:13 GM4WHA 40m SSB 58 57 GEOFF
09:15 G4HQB 40m SSB 59 55 Phil
09:15 M0MDA 40m SSB 59 59 Michael
09:16 G6AEK 40m SSB 55 57 David
09:26 G7CDA 2m SSB 59 59 Douggie
09:27 M0KNP/P 2m SSB 59 59 Clive
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Hi Mark, great report with photos! Did you work out the problem with the amp?

Geoff vk3sq

Used to use i3, then bspwm, now it’s just gnome and fullscreen programs :sweat_smile: tmux if I need multiple terminal windows.

Nice views today!

It’s not the first snow in the Cairngorms this year…that was back in September, but tonight has been the first snow in Aberdeen…so probably 6’ on the mountains :sweat_smile:

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I used to i3 on one of my laptops but never really put the effort in to learn it properly. As it happens I watched a youtube video yesterday on tmux, I wasn’t aware of it. I have used Gnu Screen for vintage machine VMs previously, will need to look into that.

Cheers, Mark.

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I did get a response from a local amateur that he could hear me using the amp and that I was approximately 1 S-Point louder, so it may be working but was a case of bad timing attempting to get the German station I was talking to verify whether it was working. I started on 80m but didn’t get any contacts with the amp in-line, but then I didn’t get any contacts without the amp when I moved back to the band later.

I’ll put it on a dummy load later and verify.

Mark.

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Thanks for sharing Mark - you had some lovely views. :ok_hand:

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View of Old Man of Coniston on the left today

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There was no snow on Tinto GM/SS-064 yesterday but lots of frost on the ground for the last 50m. The wire fences had lots of frosticles /rime ice. The ground was quite hard frozen too. In fact there was sloppy mud at the bottom and frozen mud half way. I’ve not done Tinto in the winter for some time, only in the drier months and I haven’t seen so much mud for ages.

There’s nowhere to shelter on the summit despite there being a 20x20m cairn 10m high. The wind was Baltic and whistled around the cairn and as it was sunny part of the time, 200 million people walked to the top. I managed being on air for 61mins before it became just too damn cold. Probably -5/-8C windchill. Also occasional cloud/mist which was condensing out so damp and cold. Yum!

A walker asked the best question ever when he heard Morse coming out of the speaker. “Can you understand that?” What an inspired question because I’m sure there are lots of people who sit in the mist on top of a 720m mountain in -5C windchill making blooping noises they don’t understand. He had that vacant look in his eyes that you see whenever the mugshot of a serial killer is shown on TV. I said “it’s just like learning French or German.” He wandered off muttering. I guess it takes all sorts.

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These are also the preferred locations to send messages when you’re acting as a spy. Or so I’ve heard :man_detective::eyes:

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It does get cold on top of Tinto in the Winter.
I finally gave up when I was last there when my phone stopped working and I couldn’t send or see spots.
Andy
MM7MOX

turns out the amp is not putting any power out.

Mark.

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