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