Having seen Glyn’s poll this morning, it made me think of another poll, just for fun really!
Regardless of mode, what band would you chose for SOTA, so imagine from now, you were only allowed to ever use band for all your future activations, which one would you go for? If you want to add something in the comments, I suppose the obvious question would be, why have you chosen that band?
Presumably this poll is only aimed at activators not chasers. I am both anyway… I’ve gone for 40m myself, the band of guaranteed success for me whatever the propagation, but with 2m (FM) as second choice if I had one.
60M for me. Good propagation and less of a zoo when operating.
2M FM next, although often comes first if the weather is bad or I am in a hurry (assuming I am somewhere with access to 2M FM chasers)
40M next, more contacts likely than 60M and of course this one is not limited to full licence holders (UK), but it can be a bit of a battle with getting a frequency, holding it and then dealing with somewhat unruly pile ups. Some may call all that fun.
Yeah purely just a “For Fun” thing! I only had activations in mind, but if the chasers want to join in, then why not?
More just out of interest, I cannot stand 40m, hence why HF for me is consigned to 80 and 60, 2m still is my preferred band, cannot see it changing anytime soon!
I’ve gone for 2m myself as this this always my first choice band for SOTA activating, but quite often have to go to 20m or 40m if 2m is no good from a SOTA summit.
60 for me. It works when 40 is long and 80 is dead, it doesn’t get the mark II woodpecker, and it has the extra interest of being an emerging band with more countries coming on every month. That goes for both activating and chasing.
I only have a resonant antenna for 20m for activating HF sota and its never let me down yet. 2m however makes it very difficultbto activate some hills.
What’s bad about 40M ? I’ve not done any HF activations yet but want to give it a go some time. 40M would be my first attempt. I’ve had good results on 40M in the WW CQ SSB contests over a number of years including top English single band operator.
I worked INKy today on forty, but the only stations that I could hear working him were on the continent, there was virtually no NVIS propagation at all so no G/GWs heard. OTOH, when it is working well, you can tune any phone frequency and find the stations layered three deep, which also can be a problem for a QRP activation. 5 watts would have really struggled on forty today, eighty was dead, but sixty was working well. The ideal is to have a choice of several bands and find the one that works well for you on the day!
2m is usually my first choice, but if I could only have one band, I’d go for 30m as it always seems to deliver. This may be helped by people monitoring around 10.118 (as I often do when I am in the shack), so even without an alert or a spot, a reply is likely. YMMV
I chose 40m because my activations are always day time and this band is available to all class of licence in Australia this hopefully would give me more chasers .
280 activations and I qualified almost all of them on 20 meters (a few summits I was too busy on 12 meters to even try 20 meters… during the challenge days) …hard for me to argue with that.
A lot depends on your approach and point of view. Are you there for yourself or to assist as many as possible on their way to the awards? If it’s the latter, 2m FM only, for instance, is not going to cut it!