The weather forecast for SOTA Fun Evening was a disaster, so with this in mind I decided to go and have a play in my office this afternoon. At first wx conditions were fine on the summit but before too long I was greeted with typical “Wesh rain” the type wich looks like light drizzle but soaks you through in minutes, so the waterproofs were donned and an umbrella which my xyl had long since left in my car was fixed to a fence with re-usable cable ties and became the perfect waterproof housing for my 857, 7ah SLAB, palm paddle and logging tackle.
I fired off on 30m-cw with 15 Watts into the linked dipole and only managed 6 QSO’s but a quick QSY to 40-CW and things became suddenly busy. 31 QSO’s were made in fairly quick succession on 40m-CW before things dried up.
I have never had much success on HF SSB from a summit, so with plenty of juice left in the SLAB I decided to give it a go. The results were quite odd, the skip length must have shortened dramatically, I made a total of 14 QSO’s on 40m-SSB but all QSO’s were in the UK, all the same, very enjoyable and nice to finally have some success on fone.
Total QSO’s = 51
30m-cw = 6
40m-cw = 31
40m-ssb = 14
Total DXCC’s = 10… G, GW, GM, F, HB9, DL, IS, SM, HA, ON,
Thanks to all stations who called in and to ON4CAP, ON6WJ, G3RMD and GW7AAV for the spots.
73
Mike GW0DSP