Not sure what the chances are, but I’ll be on DL/AM-060 Laber on Saturday afternoon from UTC 13:00 through 14:30 - this should correspond to morning across the US. I intend to try 15m SSB (I don’t do CW) and 20m, although I think 15m is the more likely band at the moment. The wire antenna I will have with me can’t do the WARC bands so it’s 15 or 20. I can’t stay longer as the last cable car down is at 15:00 UTC and by the time I have packed up and walked back, I’ll be happy not to miss the lift as the alternative is a 2.5-3 hr walk down the mountain in what will be dark at the end of the trip.
I hope to be running about 15W however as my Ramsey Amp is currently in pieces on the workbench, it may turn out to be just 5W from the FT817ND.
S2S would be really nice and I see there is currently one US SOTA activation planned around my time frame, but I suspect I’ll need the added gain of a US chasers beam to make the contact.
There’s a slim chance also of a short path contact into VK6 or VK5 but it’ll be very late evening with them, so no EU-VK S2S possibility.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the tip. I’ll be using the Aerial-51 404-UL which covers 40 through 10 - just not the WARC bands without an ATU, so 10m would also be possible - I’ll add that to the alert, thanks. Will only have 5W from the FT817 on 15 & 10m though as I’ve only modified my (now repaired again) QAMP to work on 40, 30 & 20m.
I was hoping for perhaps some contacts (S2S) into the US yesterday afternoon from DL/AM-060 but had to pack up to leave the summit around 1430 UTC. 1500 UTC was the last cable car down and with the limited visibility fog/cloud and rain, I wasn’t going to try the 2-3 hour walk down will all my equipment, it would probably have ended in a twisted ankle or worse.
It was probably still too early both for contacts to the US and short path to VK also - in any case I didn’t get any calls from VK or US chasers that I could make out
I nearly didn’t go up as the weather was pretty horrible in the valley and it seemed from the web camera to be even worse on the summit - cold and wet. I’m glad I chanced it thugh as I got to work 37 stations over about 90 minutes. Some on 10m, 15m & 12m as well as the usual 20 & 40m. 6 x S2S around Europe - actually a duplicate S2S (the 7th) when the other station called me when I changed bands.
There was some contests running which made finding a free frequency difficult on 20 & 15 and 40m had an S8 noise level from the microwave antennas and equipment about 50m away.
I’ll put a full report on my blog on dd5lp.com as usual in a few days.