With a great nice warm and sunny weather, I chose this summit for today’s activation in order to test my own strength and ability to carry out a 20-25 minutes hike with 100m of elevation gain.
Its located near Pamplona to the North-West as you can see in the map below:
From where I parked the car at the village of Osacar, this was the look of the hike to be done and the summit:
The hike was absolutely fine and I found myself in a really good shape for such a mild demanding hike. When I got to the summit, I took some pictures with my new smartphone, which is supposed to make them with better quality than those I made before with my other phones, but it was quite hazy and I will post the pictures of the views I took from the summit at the end of the activation, when the air was clearer.
This picture was taken at the start of the hike.
Once at the summit, we find this:
My setup was the usual 14m long endfed wire as a sloper hung from the top of my 7m long telescopic fishing rod. The wire going down to a 9:1 unun from which a 5m long counterpoise wire was extended on the grass following the same direction of the sloper antenna wire. The antenna was connected to my SOTA kit formed by a MFJ-941B antenna tunner and my Yaesu FT-817ND rig at 5W.
I also installed a Diamond mobile vertical whip antenna connected to my HH Yaesu FT-23R. You can see it in the following picture:
The antenna wire was invisible in the original picture, so I’ve drawn a red line.
This is the first time I’ve been for so long in a SOTA activation, with a total of 4 hours between the 1st logged QSO and the last one. It’s the first time I’ve exhausted my battery. I’d have probably stayed even longer, but I realized the voltage of the LiFePo4 battery seen by my FT-817ND was 11V, so I went QRT to avoid risking any damage to my trusty battery, which has been giving me great service for several years now.
In all this time, I started on 30m CW, then went to 40m SSB, followed by 20m CW, then I had a looking for and working S2S on several different bands and modes. This is something I enjoyed doing thanks to my endfed wire and the flexibility that my antenna tuner gives me. Then I had a run on 40m CW, then some more S2S chasing, another run on 20m SSB and finally a couple of QSOs on 2m FM.
All in all, I logged 91 QSOs and 18 S2S.
I won’t post the full log this time as I often do in previous reports because it’s a long log, but you can always check it on the database in case you are interested.
I’ll post the map here:
During my time activating I had the chance to copy Pat @WW4D on the 2 passes he made by 20m CW. I called him, but he never seemed to copy me, big shame!..
When I had just made my S2S with HA5GB/P on 20m SSB, I heard @VK5PAS calling him and making the QSO with him. I asked him to QSY 5 up for a QSO with me, but he never seemed to copy me. An even bigger shame!..
It’s been quite a hard work but I really enjoyed very much the hike and the long activation.
Now it’s the time to share with you some of the pictures I took from the summit at the end of the activation:
Thanks dear chasers & activators for your calls and QSOs.
I’ll be looking forward to copying you all again from a SOTA soon.
73,
Guru