I’ve never had much luck in the hills to the north of the Carron Valley, from finding live-baited bird traps, to being shouted at by a Northern-Irish Robocop, and breaking the back wheel of my bike a long way from home. It’s a hellish grouse moor and wind farm combination that I’m not sure why I ever come back to, but what it does have going for it, are two comparatively accessible SOTA Summits including one with a winter bonus. I had a couple of days off work ahead of Christmas, and rather than doing the sensible thing and waiting for the glorious blue skies on the 24th, I decided to head out on the 23rd of December, when the forecast was for overcast but dry conditions. MWIS had suggested a cloudbase of around 700m, ruling out any of the Munros or higher tops, but these two hills (GM/SS-175 Carleatheran and GM/SS-163 Stronend) were sitting around the 500m mark, so I figured I’d have an easy day on my hands.
I parked up at Todholes Farm, as it’s the approach I’m more familiar with from running and cycling around this area, although with hindsight, parking at the Gargunnock/Kippen side would’ve probably been a better approach, the drop down wasn’t nearly as scary looking in reality as I thought it might’ve been from looking at the map. From Todholes, the wind farm tracks make fast and easy progress most of the way to Carleatheran, with only a last couple of hundred metres needed across a soft grassy scrape to the summit shelter.
As you can maybe tell from the image, the cloud base had not in fact been at 700m at all, but probably closer to about 350-400m. Still, other than everything being OmniDamp™, the rain had stayed off and it was time to get hunkered down in the small stone fortress. There’s a handy trig point in the middle of the summit shelter, complete with open cap, so I popped the 4m fibreglass pole up with the Spectrum Slim G and got cracking.
This is where the first part of the apology comes in - on calling CQ, I got the impression that there were a few more people getting back to me than I was able to hear. Thankfully Robert @GM4GUF came through nice and clearly all the way from Biggar (and was very helpful at trying to help me with my receiving troubles), then Eoghann @MM0EMC in Perthshire and Alan @GM7VCV in Kilbirnie followed closely behind. My big problem was that I seemed to be getting quite a lot of FM broadcast breaking through into my receive and wiping out whatever I could hear - I knew there were a couple of masts in the area, but I hadn’t seemed to have so much trouble when activating on the nearby Meikle Bin the week before. I could definitely hear a few people trying to respond to my calls, so apologies if I was inadvertently rude and stepping over any replies. Unfortunately even my attempts to swap to my backup handheld, or swap the big Slim G for a smaller 40cm whip weren’t much more useful. Eventually however, I did manage to get Adam @2M1ADM in Linlithgow in the log, so that meant I could get packed up and get moving towards my second summit.
I was already behind schedule, and getting my four contacts at Carleatheran took a good bit longer than planned, so my next move was to resort to trail runner mode and do a wee shuffly jog back to the wind farm track, to generate a bit of body heat after sitting still for so long if nothing else.
There wasn’t much of a view, but I followed the track over the side of Ling Hill, and down towards the Spout of Ballochleam, with a not entirely welcome case of having to wade through a vigorous wee burn ford, that I’m sure would’ve been an easy hop to cross in the summer. That my boots were now full of water at least meant that the soft boggy quad track up to the summit of Stronend didn’t really phase me too much.
The track up from the Spout of Ballochleam is essentially just a soft quad bike track up through the grass, and while it’s never really enough to call a structured path or track, it was simple enough to follow, mostly running parallel to the Boquhan Burn all the way to the summit.
Once again, the summit at Stronend is marked with a handy stone shelter wrapped around a trig point with an open top, so up went the Slim G and out went some more CQ calls. Once again, I was having a lot of trouble with music breaking into my receive, and probably even worse than previously on Carleatheran. My other problem was that the summit shelter was built to protect against the prevailing southwesterly, so of course the wind happened to be a robust easterly, so I had to use the trig point itself for what wind shelter I could get from it.
After a wee bit of trying, I managed to pick up Norman @GM1CNH in Edinburgh, and a few minutes later got Peter @GM0VEK in Kirkintilloch. That’s me now 3/3 - I’ve managed to catch Peter on all three of my SOTA days so far. A good while and lots of swearing later, I managed to catch Colwyn @MM0YCJ over in the Pentlands on Allermuir Hill (GM/SS-171).
I was starting to lose patience by this point, and being acutely aware of being short of daylight, only a couple of days on the right side of the winter solstice. My hands were getting cold and thoughts of a hot, carb-heavy dinner were starting to overpower any desire to get SOTA points, and you know that saying about how three buses come at once? Well, sure enough, first I caught Chris @MM0UHR who was cycling on the canal, then regular contact and pal from the Meshtastic group Paddy @MM7IGV, and finally just as I was starting to get ready to fling everything in the rucksack, Steve @GM1DSK came through from Perthshire.
From there, it was again time to reactivate trail runner mode, and take advantage of the fact that it was easier to shuffle downhill through the soft bog than it was dragging myself up it. Highlight of my exit route was the usual excuse for a wee giggle at the map and favourite water feature “Backside Burn”.
Strava Activity:
Carleatheran Activation Log:
Stronend Activation Log:
Anyway, beyond the activation day itself, I was having an absolutely hellish time with the receive on my radio, and this has been a wee bit of a common theme. I’m new to amateur radio (I passed my foundation in October 2025, and just upgraded to my intermediate in early December 2025, and I’ve just been using a couple of cheap hand-held radios to get me started. The radio in question I was using for this activation was the Tidradio TD-H8 - I’d seen some of Fraser (MM0EFI)'s youtube videos where he’d had some pretty good results on RF-heavy hilltops with the H8, but I was getting fairly audible music coming through on mine, so I don’t know if mine was maybe from a different batch etc., or whether it’s good against pagers and the like but not so useful against broadcast stations?
My other radio that I’d previously used on hilltops or out and about was the Radtel RT-920, and the biggest problem I’d had with it was that I’d get a periodic burst of noise overpowering the RX every couple of seconds, which I’d assumed must’ve been from mobile masts or pagers or similar. In previous contacts, I was encountering a lot of interference around the mobile masts at Port Dundas in Glasgow with this handset.
I’m aware that these cheap Chinese radios all use a fairly similar build approach, using an SDR type chip to digitally sample the RF signal and process it from there, and that a classic superheterodyne type receiver with better input filtering would be the way to go for better performance in situations like these. The tricky thing I’m finding at the moment, is how to get my hands on a superhet-based HT without spending loads of money. From what I can gather, there are plenty of models out there, but most of these have been discontinued now (Yaesu FT-60, Icom V86 etc.). My call for help is mostly this: does anybody know of a cheap-ish simple superhet-based handy that’s good for dealing with this sort of thing? I’d also looked at picking up something like the Sotabeams bandpass filter, but it seems to have been out of stock for a while.
Anyway, trying to suss out the source of the interference, my guesses at the culprits would likely either be Earl’s Hill (various radio) which was about 5km from Carleatheran, or the Fintry telly transmitter which was about 3km west of Stronend? Also, there were various other bits of mast kicking about, including the weather station for the Earlsburn and Kingsburn wind farms, and two masts that I couldn’t identify just on the other side of Backside Burn (approx location grid square NS 65 88)
Sorry for the rambly post - any help or advice from more experienced heads would be very welcome!
But you could see the water levels were frequently higher with all the water flattened vegetation around the burn. As that “well known” saying goes “Even a squelchy day on the hill is better than a day in A&E at the children’s hospital with a sick small person”