IOMARS planning to simultaneously activate all 5 Manx SOTA Sunday 14th June

Our IOMARS member on Slieau Freoaghane GD-002 will spot himself by text tomorrow morning and GD0GGO should be with me on Bradda Hill GD-004. The other 2 SOTA are now on SOTAwatch alerts.

…yes Andy it sure is, slows you down heaps!

Not seen any spots yet. Did the weather spoil things?

We had a great day. Between us we activated all the 5 Manx SOTAs and I managed S2S with the other 4 from Bradda Hill. We also managed to do some 2m SSB as well as just using the HHs for FM. We tried some 20m hf but had no successful contacts. Between us we had contacts from Ireland Scotland and South Wales as well as Yorkshire as well as a MM contact in the Copeland Islands. As only my second day doing SOTA pretty happy and will definitely do some more and the IOMARS will probably try this again so we can play musical chairs with our 5 peaks.

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20 metres seemed to be working plenty well enough, so spots on SOTAWatch might have helped with that difficulty, unless it was equipment-related at your end…

Edit: Oops! :face_with_hand_over_mouth: There were two spots for 2 metres SSB. However, they had ā€œnot contest stationā€ in their comment, and this caused them to trip SOTAWatch’s ā€œIgnore test spotsā€ option, so I missed them. I have now un-set that option. I couldn’t find any spots for 20 metres activity, though.

I had one Manx QSO today on 40m. I was on GM/SS-216 but it wasn’t a S2S. I wasn’t too sure on the suffix so had to check it. I used to live in and around Douglas years ago but didn’t play radios at the time. I hope you had a great day.

I just heard you above the noise on 2m this morning from Dumyat but unfortunately not enough for a QSO.

20m was working well for us chasing /Maritime Mobile this afternoon.

We (MM7MOX/MM and GM7EEY/MM) managed to chase @HB9HCS/P, @EA2ETB/P and @DH2ID/P from the Firth of Forth just off Inchmickery and Cramond island.(IO86IA90, 56.00.201N, 3.15.461W)

Unfortunately we didn’t have the right counterpoise for 40m with us so couldn’t chase any of the closer summits.

Andy

MM7MOX/MM (today)

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For myself and the IOMARS club member on Bradda Hill GD-004 this was really our first successful SOTA activation and we learnt lots and I think it has certainly encouraged me to do more. So when I am in the Lake District in a week and planning to walk some Wainwrights my VX6 HH and telescopic Diamond SRH770 will be going along and I’'ll put some alerts and maybe try the text spotting. We also had a yagi with us today which was so much better than when using the HH vertical and allowed us to try out SSB and get a MM station with SSB and I will investigate a small enough easy to assemble yagi which is rucsackable. I sense the intention is to do this again so we will be better and more effectively prepared next time!

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It’s easy to spot yourself using sotl.as, or on the sotawatch website.
I’ve registered for SMS spotting but haven’t had to use it yet.

Good to catch you (and later Simon) on 2m FM. I didn’t hear anyone on any of the other summits.

Thank you @MD0RTZ for the QSO from GD/GD-003 today. I was operating as EJ3LH on IOTA EU-121 and activated at the same time double ATNO’s IE-0266 and IE-0267.

Also thank you to @MW0PJE on GW/NW-016 too.

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It was a brilliant day for me too, I’d never made a contact into the Isle of Man before, and here I managed to get S2S with all of the Manx summits except GD/GD-005 Mull Hill - annoyingly, I heard the operator on the hill when I was on my way up, but didn’t bother trying for a QSO as I figured it’d all be nice and easy once I got to the top… little did I expect just how much activity there’d be on 2m and how tricky it’d be finding a clear frequency!

A great wee combo those two, I’m a big fan of the RH770 - I’d mostly been using a Slim G on a 4m pole for my QSOs today, but I think I was using the RH770 when I made our first S2S just as I was packing the pole away (as well as our first QSO as I was on my way up The Merrick).

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