My second SOTA activation - this time a hill local to our home. Moel Fenlli is one of five SOTA summits in the Clwydian Hills in North Wales. The weather today is better than forecast, so my wife and I took the opportunity to go for a walk, and get a SOTA activation.
We sat in the hill fort earth works on the lee side of the hill to keep out of most of the breeze, and I set my EFHW antenna in an East/West direction. I sat down to find a frequency to call, and ended up choosing 14.290MHz. Before getting my spot loaded up, I heard another CQ SOTA call on this frequency from Markus (@HB9EIZ, operating as DL/HB9EIZ/P), so instead of loading my spot I waited patiently for an opportunity to get a S2S call. I have only recently starting to take my radio out and about, and I never fail to be amazed by the lack of noise floor on top of a hill. Markus was crystal clear, but the signal strength was low - I was very happy to make the contact.
I found another clear frequency, made the spot and started calling CQ. Fairly quickly I started receiving responses - thanks @HB9BHW , @DJ5AV , @EA2CCG, @EA7GV , @EA1DHB and @SA4BLM.
After these calls, I moved to 40m, but didn’t raise any additional calls.
Some pictures:
Looking north west, towards Llandudno. The hills in the distance on the left hand side are Snowdonia:
Looking to the south west, towards Cader Idris:
Moel Famau (GW/NW-044) - accessible from the same car park. We could be back up before the end of the week to activate this:
On the summit, before setting up:
Very happy to have my wife with me. She doesn’t have an interest in amateur radio, but likes to walk up hills with me!
One question now I have returned and submitted my logs: I have entered the S2S contact as an S2S, but also as a QSO in the activator log. Is that correct, or would the S2S entry be picked up automatically and correctly attributed?
I’ve sent you a private message.