Had a blast today on G/SP-017 Billinge Hill with Peter M1BZJ.
Played around on 40m, 20m 10m and 2m and did a lot of socialising when Tom M1EYP and also Gary M1DYU arrived on summit. A fun day out with the weather being better than forecast as it was sunny most of the time with only a small breeze keeping the temperature down.
Peter spent a lot of time being public relations officer as the summit gets a lot of traffic from people just having a local walk.
Rigs: FT-891 (100W) - HF , FT-817 (5W) - 2m SSB , FT-8900 (25W) for 2m FM (only a couple of qsos on 2m FM today).
Antenna: 1/4 Wave Groundplane for HF and 3 element beam for 2m.
It was an intention to try out some aluminium foilised mylar sheets as a groundplane, but I couldn’t find enough rocks on the summit to stop them blowing around.
Used an FT-891 for HF with 100W into a quarter wave telescopic whip. The 2m setup was huriedly added when I found out there was a 2m contest , so SSB was likely to be fruitful.
Over the 4 hours or so , we worked quite a few with about 5 or 6 summit to summits.
Best DX was ZS6LZ which was my first African summit to summit. It took a few tries, but we got there. Tom (M1EYP) also made the qso from the same setup a few minutes later.
Also a TM5 contest station on 2m SSB was worked at around 260 miles, which considering my FT-817 seems a little poorly (Toms 817 had better signals on 2m than mine using the same antenna) it wasn’t a bad result.
A coil was added to the GP antenna to allow 40, which had some nice inter-g qso’s.
Antenna connection and radials below:
This small summit is much denigrated, but for a local summit its ideal for a casual activation.
Many thanks to all worked and glad I could help contribute to the event (and collect some new badges 
)
Ian
G7ADF