My walking buddy sounded slightly disapointed when we continued on through Falkland, “Aren’t we walking from here?” Despite growing up 4km the other side of the hill he didn’t know there was a cheats car park mid way between East and West Lomond. (although he did then regale me with stories of when he and teenage cronies got their first mountain bikes and had a race down the inpenetrable north face of East Lomond to Falkland. Amazingly no casulty visits occurred (that time)).
So, much to his disgust, we started out along with the sunday lunch crowd (having grabbed the last available parking space) and headed up the motorway to our goal:
The summit had a bigger congregation than the parish church so we descended a wee bit in the activation zone to the south east to hide from the tourists and the wind (pretty succesfully) and set up a shack to die for:
The view from here extended from Arthurs seat, round North Berwick Law (hi Steve (1INK/p)), St Abbs Head, (we think we could see Cheviot), the whole coastline of Fife,all the way up the Tay and up the north coast past Montrose. And of course, Auchtermuchty.
With the ground more peaty, and sloping away steeply south east the aerial seemed to work very well with big signals from EU and G and most amazingly quite big reports coming back (4watts out). It felt so pleasantly warm that walking buddy was quite happy to stave off the disappointment of a “proper” walk and read his kindle in the warm sunshine while I amassed 95 qsos on 7/14/18/21/28. 28 was dissapointing, with big signals heard but few qsos and a failure with kk4nqq who was only just there with me. Again I had quite a few conversations with interested “public” some of who were amazed I could get to America with that little box. (America turned out to be a struggle possibly shielded by the hill itself).
Suddenly, about 15:15 we became aware that it had suddenly turned utterly baltic as the sun slipped around the side and as often happens the pack up was about 10 minutes too late to be totally pleasant. It would be nice to stay till the bands open more to the USA, but not nice at all…
We took the easy (sunny) way down past the trig:
with a last wave to the boys from Auchtermuchty singing "… And I would walk 500 more, Just to be the man who worked a thousand miles " (and more)
cheers
Andy
gm8oeg