Hi Rene,
I don’t want to start an ATU vs. non-ATU war, but honestly, during my 632 activations, I never needed an ATU.
All my HF rigs don’t contain an ATU, but I own two small QRP ATUs: a manual Z-tuner and an automatic ATU-10, both from Aliexpress. They both work perfectly fine, but I only used them for some experiments.
17 days after you, albeit with better weather, I also activated this summit.
On this summit I used my proven LAB599 TX-500 with a loaded vertical antenna, which I mainly use on summits with limited space.
In this picture you can see this antenna in action, resulting in 45 contacts:
The following video shows my personal pros and cons of this resonant antenna:
Tomorrow for the Trans-Atlantic S2S party I’ll use the same antenna mount with the earth spike, but instead of the shortened vertical I’ll use the cheap full size quarter wave vertical from Aliexpress (see the reflector thread Cheap 1/4 wave antenna whip from AliExpress (Part 2))
There are so many different antenna solutions, just choose what suits your situation best!
73 Stephan