Torfest
I had wanted to take part in the activity on Friday but it turns out that I was travelling down the M6 and M5, on that day, to my XYL’s father’s house near Newton Abbot in Devon.
Today I negotiated swapping a trip to Trago to a trip up High Willhays G/DC-001 instead. The journey to the Okehampton Camp takes about 45 mins. The traffic was fairly quiet today, I set the car cruise control going and gently wafted along the A38 and A30. I drove as far as permissible by turning right at the hut, and following the tarmac road until it ran out and changed to gravel.
The path is a maintained gravel road leading to Yes Tor, which I’ve seen used by military Land Rivers. Just before Yes Tor, an obvious path branches off the road, leading across to High Willhays G/DC-001. The walk was a little longer than I thought it was (it’s been a couple of years since I was there last), and I didn’t arrive at the summit until my alerted on air time of 1300.
I used my SOTAbeams 3 band linked dipole and KD1JV first edition Mountain Topper. I like the Altoids tin rig as it’s very easy to pack ‘just in case’. I usually use a 4m pole and lightweight dipole but they weren’t easy to grab as I’ve recently moved house, so a standard 7m pole was found and put into the Picasso boot.
I had looked at the propagation information and it was saying that all bands were ‘poor’. Oh well, it was worth a shot. I started off on 20m, I fully expected a dead band but on the default power on frequency of 14.060, there was a lot of strong activity. I used ‘DFE’ (direct frequency entry) to put the rig on 14.061 and the frequency was lovely and quiet. There were no responses to my QRLs so I set the CQ memory going. After a few rounds of CQ, Frank DL6UNF answered, unfortunately mid QSO my 7m pole decided to collapse. Thankfully Frank had stayed on frequency whilst I fixed the antenna!
The antenna behaved for the rest of the activation. I was amazed to be called by Bob AC1Z, I really wasn’t expecting to work across the pond today. Rich N4EX, Gary K3TCU and Ariel NY4G followed Bob into the log book on 20m. I’ve said it so many times, but isn’t it amazing communicating with people a quarter of the way around the world using a tiny circuit board housed in an old mint tin?
I switched to 40m and worked a few stations. I was horrified to hear ‘dah, dit, di-di-dit, dah’ (test) upon initial band switching to 7.030, so I remembered an old tip from Ken G3XQE, I worked him a few times on 40m during the day and he had suggested using the DX window at the bottom of the band- there’s not much DX traffic during daylight hours. I found the band blissfully quiet at 7.011MHz.
The WX was misty throughout my activation, it’s a good job that I knew the way!
73 and HNY
Colin