I moved to Bentham in 2018. Bentham is located on the western edge of North Yorkshire, right in the no man’s land between the Yorkshire Dales National Park and the Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Lancashire is to my west and Cumbria is to my north. I’m well placed for SOTA as I have LD, NP and SP regions within short (<1 hour) car journey reach.
One thing that I’m not well placed for is socialising with other hams, I’ve felt fairly cut off living where I do. I had started to seek out local hams but then the Covid pandemic hit.
I’ve known about Morecambe Bay Amateur Radio Society (MBARS) for some time and indeed, our very own Mark, @M0NOM , has some involvement with them. I was contacted by an MBARS official last week to ask why I was on the mailing list and it ended up with me visiting the club meeting this week. In my research about MBARS, I saw an article about a SOTA activation of Gummer’s How, which triggered an idea…
https://mbars.uk/sota-from-gummers-how/
(Phew! What a long intro!)
My wife made friends with another mum from the school that my son attended before we moved, and every so often they try to meet up. My eldest son is of a similar age to my wife’s friend’s son (are you following? 
), so they enjoy seeing each other too. As Morecambe is not so far from us, and the weather is great at the moment, my wife and her friend, along with the boys, decided to meet there for some seaside fun. It was suggested to me that I should occupy myself with SOTA or similar, I don’t need a second invitation to do SOTA!
Gummer’s How seemed like a decent target summit, I had never considered it before. The car park for Gummer’s How is about 1 hour (32 miles) from home. The walk was quite steep and honestly it was fairly hard work in the heat, but thankfully the ascent was quite short. The cattle were taking advantage of the shade in the bushes.
There wasn’t much shade at the top!
I’d been following the K index trend and noticed that it was down to 2 after an unsettled period, I reckoned that HF would be usable but not great, and so it turned out.
I’d gone for lightweight gear, so I had packed my MTR-5B and complimentary 5 band dipole. I started on 15m, the band was extremely quiet, but I managed 3 QSOs before I had no more responses. I set the rig to auto CQ until I’d been on the band for 10 minutes, I then switched to 17m. On 17m I again operated for 10 minutes, but I only managed 1 QSO, which was actually a dupe of a contact on 15m. 20m was a bit more productive and I had a scratchy S2S with CT7/EA2WX/P on CT/DL-003.
Switching to 30m brought better signals and was definitely the band that was working better than the others. I had a strange sounding, raspy, QSO with Phil @G4OBK, which presumably was via some unconventional propagation mode - would have been interesting to have been using a beam and finding out the beam headings. I was called by Andy @G8CPZ but at the same time a lady approached me and was asking about my activity. I was a little distracted- sorry Andy, but at least you’re in the log! I spoke to the lady for quite a while, she was asking loads of questions! I was even photographed whilst the lady posed next to me. Apparently the lady lived fairly locally and had seen other ‘radio activity’ and wondered what it was.
To be quite honest, by this point, my brain was fried but I felt like I needed to do 40m to complete the set. It was great to be called by Hans, PB2T, on DM/ND-009 as DL/PB2T/P, I haven’t worked Hans for a long time. I let Larry the lobster finish my activation, whilst I opened a can of coffee which had been kept cold on an ice block.
Apologies for the QLF, my lobster is still in training!
Between us, we managed to get 25 QSOs in to log across 5 bands including 2 S2S, so not a bad tally really. I will definitely be doing Gummer’s How again, I can’t believe that I haven’t done it before now! The views of Lake Windermere are awesome!
73, Colin
