Thought I ought to do something for the weekend - so in spite of all my activations being unique to date, I decided to go back to a local hill with a reasonably quick (50 mins for me) walk up. Will keep this short as I’m sure there will be lots of write-ups from the activity this weekend. I have posted a few pictures on the Flickr pages.
It seemed a good idea to try to activate as many bands as possible with what I presently have - so that meant being encumbered with a lot of stuff (including both homebrew linears), since I’m not organised enough yet to have dipoles with bits that attach for different bands - there’s one for each.
I got to the layby at a reasonable time for the alert time I’d given, but when I got to the summit I realised that the weather forecast was not as good as I’d thought - there had been a couple of showers on the way up, and it was very windy. However 80m was soon set up ready to go, but the band was really quiet - after a few forlorn CQs I gave up and decided to move to 40m.
Forty was much better - and I soon had a few contacts, with Andy MM0USU offering to spot. That brought a moderate pile up, so I was happy to keep going until it ran out - about 45 mins activation. The skip down to the south of England was excellent, and there were plenty other contacts through into eastern Europe.
I then moved up to 20m but found only lots of strong Italian stations and a bit of DX going on - couldn’t find any SOTA activity. Since a few people had said they might try 6m (and there had been some Es yesterday late afternoon), I had taken the 3-ele 6m beam with me, but no joy from other summits; I was answered locally by GM0WDD which at least reassured me that things were working (though horizonal polarisation was hard to achieve - see the Flickr photos!).
So, up to 2m; a few welcome S2S contacts there, including Andy MM0FMF/P on a rubber duck from GM/SS-033 Corserine - I’d expected him on higher frequencies this weekend. Not a lot of activity that I could pick up on 2m though, and CQs didn’t bring anything; I can normally do rather better so maybe conditions were not wonderful. Sadly I couldn’t move to 70cm as intended, as the feeder for the SOTAbeams 70cm yagi had broken - one of the croc clips was no longer connected to a conductor, so I’m sorry that 70cms didn’t get an outing from Scald Law.
A very enjoyable time was had (over 3 hours at the summit!) - and best of all, the hill was DRY so it was a very pleasant walk too.
Good luck to all who get out tomorrow - the forecast here is not wonderful so that won’t include me.
73
John
GM8OTI