Hi Jimmy,
It was exciting to see your family photo on FB.
You are both masters - Tom due to his encouriging activity and SOTA popularisation & You due to supporting him - you both have double power, I really appreciate it.
I wish you more and more achievements and hope to meet you on the frequencies !
73, Jarek
All eggs were accounted for in the batch of 20 homemade Scotch eggs that Jimmy and I made the night before Phil. 7 were eaten as our family Saturday night tea, accompanied with Blacksticks Blue cheese and large spicy pickled onions. 4 went out on a delivery run - 1 each for my mum, my brother, plus Richard G3CWI and Wee Wah. A further 4 came to GW with me, and Jimmy and Liam had a couple for his Sunday lunch at home.
That left 3, one of which I’ve just had for my breakfast with a lemon split Welsh cake and decapitated coffee.
The summit beers were, of course, Welsh ales - Brains S.A. Gold and Reverend James.
This means we (M1EYP & M0HGY) have both activated every summit in:
G (175 + 7 now-deleted summits)
GW (158 summits)
GI (65 + 1 now-deleted summit)
GD (5 summits)
GJ (1 summit)
GU (2 summits)
The elephant in the room is therefore GM, and will remain so, as I see no possibility of me ever dangling from ropes on St Kilda sea stacks.
We’ve also activated every summit in PA (both of them), and thought we had in LX - but LX/LX-005 has replaced LX/LX-002. That might seem frustrating, but we always intended to return to ON to activate more summits there anyway, plus we have plans for a future road trip to Germany, so at some point we should recomplete LX.
We’ve also activated in EA8 and EI. At present no-one in the family has any appetite for boarding an aeroplane, but we do fancy trips to GM and EI, as well as the aforementioned further trips into ON/LX/DM - and probably F at some point. Plenty of scope to push the activator uniques tally beyond 500 at least!
Are you sure? I have a feeling that Brains is no longer Welsh,
73,
Rod
I’m not surprised with you eating 16 eggs between all of you (and beer) in a weekend. 
Pay attention at the back. Read the passage again carefully.
Well done guys! If you can get completion of GW as a chaser you will have a complete completion! 
34 to go for me Brian so some way off that yet. I expect Jimmy is considerably further away from it.
I’d strongly suggest a trip to The Vosges Tom. Fly to Basel Euroairport (and flash your shiny new blue UK “3rd-world country” passport as you wait in the non-EU line). Walk into the French part of the airport, pickup up your hire car, up the Autoroute des Cigognes, turn left at Mulhouse and then, boof, lovely mountains, loads of simple 10 pt summits, easy walking, gorgeous countryside, zillions of hotels/B&B/cafe/bistros/bars (there were before COVID) top notch food and excellent beer. Oh, and some very lovely people. One restaurant owner seemed so surprised some oddball English chap was trying his best (and struggling) to do all the ordering and talking to the staff in French rather than expecting everyone to speak English that he gave me a free beer as a thank you. So there is beaucoup entente cordial if you put you back in to the job 
Sounds great Andy. Marianne and Jimmy can both speak a bit of French. Liam and I can speak a bit of German - so I guess we could get by, between us, in HB-land. I’d be on my own in that queue though - Marianne, Jimmy and Liam all have Irish passports. Unfortunately being married to one and the father of another two doesn’t qualify me to apply for one 
You’ve been going on about finishing Wales for so long frankly I’m relieved it’s over. Like if you agree.
You would be welcome to EA2/NV (as soon as Covid19 restrictions allow) should you wish to tackle a SOTA complete project in this region with currently 161 summits, not even needing to take a plane if you don’t mind driving your car on the right side of the road…
P.D. I’m starting to think on completing at least one summit on each and every association where I have chased a SOTA as an interesting long term retirement project.
I trust the World’s most activated SOTA summit The Cloud G/SP-015 will be part of that project Guru? See you here! And maybe in EA2 one day.
Congratulations Tom and Jimmy, well done both of you!
73, John M0VCM (feeling slightly late to the party and
hoping to be back on a SOTA summit before too long)
I very much hope so.
73,
Guru
Well done, no small feat that. Nice to get you both in the log S2S from two different summits yesterday.
Cheers Richard.
And well done to you for getting from NW-012 to NW-034 within the time of our single activation.
I know ours was a long activation but even so, both yours were substantial walks. I wonder if you use a mountain bike or if you’re just one of these super-fit fast walkers (the type that make me very jealous!)?
No, just walking… to be fair you guys were up there all day, it must have been cold. Super-fit however I am most certainly not especially after lockdown 3.0 procrastination
GREAT BIG CONGRATS, TOM AND JIMMY!
All Best, Ken
After the promising signs of 15m (Brazil worked with QRP on a 40m dipole) on this GW completion activation, I was motivated to try again, but with the dedicated 15m quarterwave vertical with groundplane antenna. Marianne, Liam and I had planned a daytrip to Llandudno, so I thought this would be ideal to work some DX from Great Orme GW/NW-070.
We walked up from the pier via Happy Valley. It was very cold and windy at the summit. So cold and windy that I didn’t curse as much as one might expect upon realising I’d packed everything - apart from the 15m GP antenna…
A 2m FM handheld activation resulted, producing six QSOs including S2S with John MW0VCM/P on Tal y Fan GW/NW-040 and Andy G8CPZ/P on Gummers How G/LD-050. Superb fish & chips from The Orme chippy in Llandudno.
So instead I decided to try 15m from Gun G/SP-013 on my way to work in Leek this morning. Imagine my further frustration upon failing to find the antenna in my car either! I concluded it must be hidden away somewhere in the boot of Marianne’s car from the previous day.
I deployed 17m instead, but was disappointed both with the lack of DX in the band activity window, and moreso with the absence of stations replying to my CQ calls on FT8. Eventually I called a CQing Polish station and made a single contact. JA stations were just starting to appear on the screen as I began packing away.
So a couple of false starts there, but I still think there is fun to be had on 15m with a groundplane vertical at the current time - so watch this space!
