As of 18 hours ago, I and 40 million of my neighbors have been confined to quarters.
In the grand scheme of things it ain’t so bad as I did restock on beer and have been focused on a whole world of ham radio projects that have been woefully neglected such as addressing my bad habit of maintaining logs in ADIs on every machine I seem to have ever owned. Its a mess but I luckily discovered I had worked Belize (V31MA) for yet another DXCC credit in one of my moribund ADI files lurking on an almost discarded machine.
Right now I would be super excited at being able to safely travel back to the UK in early May but I’ll just have to wait and see.
Would really like to be a part of this years LD event if feasible!
Stay safe everyone and as horrible as this all seems, at some point sooner than later we will be on the sunny side of the hill.
B&B booked for 2 nights. I don’t plan to cancel it just yet, though suspect that we won’t be clear by this date and will have to cancel idc. I feel for the B&B owners (and many other businesses) who must be feeling the hit from this. B&Bs, hotels, pubs and restaurants will need our support when we come through this (at least that’s my excuse for a future binge!).
I’ll try to be on the air that weekend though (even if it’s just from my new home shack).
There appears to be quite a strong backlash against people going on holiday or visiting national parks in the UK at the moment. I ventured out yesterday to the local Co-operative and there are definitely people on holiday up here carrying on as if everything is normal.
Advice across the world varies substantially from total lock-down in Spain to the 2m metre rule together with non-essential travel here at the moment.
I’ve heard wildly different estimates for the ‘peak’ to hit the UK, most seem to be centred around 4-8 weeks currently but it surely is too complex an equation to solve with any degree of certainty. I anticipate there will be ‘ripples’ after the first peak too when some kind of normality returns.
Received an email today, had a week booked in the Lake District for May. Unfortunately it has been cancelled. Disappointing but fully understandable under the circumstances.
It is hard to predict what will happen by next weekend - let alone June. I was intending to do an activation today but the XYL pointed out what sort of example it would look lite to my 16 Yr old son who is struggling to cope with the concept of not being out! In Teesdale it is noticable that there are quite a large number of vehicles that are not normally here and they are not bringing gifts of loo rolls … so there are starting to be a few irate locals.
So June, best case senario Cross Fell G/NP-001 which is always fairly quiet… fingers crossed… Paul
I think you are right. The “setting a good example” thing is becoming more important. If a summit is busy and everything looks and feels normal, people are more likely to act as normal. Unfortunately the SOTA summits near here are all very popular. As I feel that driving more than half an hour constitutes an “unnecessary journey” for me, I think I will suspend my activating for the meantime. I suppose activating in the dark might still be possible…
There was a worrying interview with a young chap on our local news last week. He went from feeling fine to collapsing within a couple of hours. Not something you would want on a longer mountain walk where you might end up having to be rescued - and thus putting far more people at risk.
The National Trust have emailed me, cancelling my two nights camping at Great Langdale 19/20th June. Looks like they don’t plan to open until 1st July.