…or in other words: bring your own seat and don’t rely on others.
I do not know what you experienced during your first activations in 2022, but I can only confirm that the headline still holds true.
When I prepared for my first activation of the TrommDM/HE-068 I read in a local forum that the old wooden tower was closed due to strucutal instability. Sad on one hand side I thought, but I concluded that the summit should be less crowded by visitors and that one of the picknick tables shown in several detailed maps should be available to me. Getting closer to the hilltop, the increasing noise level sounded suspicious and raised slight concerns. Finally, I had to face a generously fenced construction area and that the wooden „Irene Tower“ had been torn down already while something new and big was being raised.
Back home I dug a bit deeper in the WWW and found out that they are building a „sky ladder“ with an ultimate hight of 33 m. I will wait with my next visit until the first 1000 visitors have proven that this „ladder to the sky“ will hold my weight and not tilt over.
My next experience was on the Kreuzberg DM/BM-241. I knew from previous visits that there were seats available. However, sometimes nature likes to play a trick on you. Although I had been there earlier in 2021 (February), the bench used before could hardly be detected this time (March 2022) because it was almost completely covered by snow.
Geeat story Peter! I was going to write something smart about German summits all having picnic tables (I’ve seen a lot on here), however I won’t, now that I see that you had a metre of snow to deal with.
The Sky Ladder looks fun. I bet you could tune it up…
Which trees? German forests on some summits make you almost cry! The picture below was taken on DM/HE-547 (Nickel) in May last year. The bark beetles are very busy all over. If you drive down the A45 direction south and pass Haiger…
Peter, I know the current situation in the Harz and Weserbergland very well. When activating DM/NS-129 the other day I had to climb dozens of horizontal ex-trees on the circular walk. All the trees brought down by the storms used to stand on the slopes, far outside the AZ. None of the trees on top of the summits fell. So, if the wind has to bring down the woods, why not on the summit, so that we at least would have a better view and take-off? /dark humor off
Since we meanwhile do have statistics and data about almost everything, I would not be surprised if someone had measured the damping of signals during SOTA activations depending on frequency, density, type and water content of the surrounding trees. I am not fully convinced that the negative aspects are as high as often communicated. As you stated, on some summits you sit in the middle of the forest. The picture below shows my activation of DM/BW-193 in June 2021.
/dark humor on
Being a scientist, I would like to recommend a simple experiment:
1.) Do the activation with surrounding trees.
2.) Cut down all the trees.
3.) Do the activation again.
4.) Draw the balance sheet (No. of QSOs, degree of sun burn, fun factor…)
/dark humor off
As said, I do not know all data but my preference is clear.
