I activated Richland Balsam W4C/WM-003 and proceeded to my next summit W4C/WM-004 Waterrock Knob when I realized I had left my 6 meter mast at the last summit (or I thought was the summit). Luckily there were trees on the summit of Waterrock Knob and just threw my wire over a tree limb using my water bottle as a throw weight. It was getting late and I still had to rush back to Richland Balsam to retrieve my mast. I still had daylight left to get to the summit but was not sure if I would have enough daylight to go back down. I did not bring a headlamp that day. I raced up to the summit and found the mast still tied to the tree. To add insult to injury I later found out I was just out of the activation zone at W4C/WM-003 and later had to email my chasers that I had an invalid activation - lost mast, found mast, lost summit activation. I had plenty of exercise anyway.
Similar thing happened to me coming down a hill one day when I spotted a rucksack lying just off the path next to a rather steep drop. First thought was that someone had fallen down. The bottom was full of trees, so couldn’t see much. I started shouting down and was trying to work out if it was safe to go down and look when a bloke came running down the path. He explained it was his rucksack which he had left so he could run up the path to look for some mates he was meant to meet up with that day. So, if you do leave a rucksack for anything other than an emergency, hiding it out of plain site is possibly a good idea to stop other folk thinking something bad has happened?
Lost my lunchbox once. It was lying on the ground. It was extremely windy. It just blew away and quickly vanished. At least I had relieved it of it’s contents first. Wasn’t worried about loss but felt guilty for inadvertently littering.
Thanks for the suggestion. Good idea I can use someday, but it’s probably not yet suitable for my situation. To explain: so far I have not lost any end caps due to dropping or misplacing them. Instead they’ve been stolen by trees.
In our part of the Southern Appalachian mountains, most of the summit approaches are on woodland trails for at least part of the route. A few have no established trails and the approach may involve some serious bushwhacking through thick growth of various trees and shrubs (W4G/NG-003 was the worst, so far).
The telescoping fishing pole I use as a 6 meter mast is almost 130 cm long. When nestled in the water bottle pocket on the side of the pack and lashed in place, it sticks up well above my head. Despite my efforts to bend over as needed, the pole often brushes against low branches. Three times now the brushing has been vigorous enough to dislodge the cap, which the recoiling branch then flings away to parts unknown.
At first I thought the leash would solve my problem. I’m concerned, though, that a leash would easily get tangled in the branches, leaving me stuck like Aesop’s stag. That probably would happen more often than the loss of the end cap.
The XYL has promised to help me turn some scrap nylon into carrying sleeve, something like an archer’s quiver, that I can hang lower on the backpack. Hopefully this will lower the height of the pole and protect it from the rapacious branches. At that point the leash solution will become feasible.
And yes, I am aware of the SOTAbeams masts that collapse to a much shorter package. One of my fellow hams has one I admire. When it’s time to replace this pole, that’s the direction I’ll go.
That’s what I thought as well, when I started SOTA. In the meantime, the more summits I activated, the more hassle it was to carry that one bulky fibreglass pole around that I own for more than 30 years. I found that Chinese fishing poles come i a variety of lengths for next to nothing.
By now I have a collection of poles, which starts at a lightweight 5m pole with a storage length of approx. 50cm and a weight of approx. 300g, which is perfect for check in luggage, and ends with a DXWire 10m pole which is really stable.
73 Jens HB9EKO
I was like you using a pole that was about 1.3m collapsed. Then I got a 5m pole that was around 55cms collapsed and it was ideal for putting in luggage for foreign holidays but I kept using my older pole in GM etc. And it got caught on low branches and deer gates all the time. I kept the short pole for foreign trips. Then one day when not thinking I managed to reverse my car over my usual pole and destroyed it. I replaced it with a pole from a supplier recommended by Phil G4OBK, Life’s a Breeze. Their 5m travel pole is far, far more sturdier than the old pole and collapses to 57cms. It’s a little heavier at 525g but is worth the weight for the strength.
Having a short pole on the side of the bag is a godsend after using something over twice as long. Getting caught up in bushes is a thing of the past. In fact the pole is such an improvement over before that I checked out getting another to use, basically so I had a spare. Sadly they’re out of stock. I rang them up and COVID is playing havoc with shipping and factory production but they expect to have their Ultimate poles in stock in March and the travel poles (the compact one) in May.
Get a pole that collapses to around 50-60cms if you can, so much better when walking.
The original cap on my 7m pole having gone missing at some stage, I replaced it with a chair leg tip, purchased from a nationwide hardware store. The size required for this pole was 38mm ID, a perfect fit. I bought the white option as I figured that would be more visible on a forest floor than the other option, black. And it makes a strong base for the pole when used inverted as a walking pole, better than using the original screw-fitting base. For shorter poles, the smaller chair leg caps might fit. Much better than adhesive tape.
I do the same. After 3 visits, they now recognize me when I show up, pole in hand.
They look like nice poles at a good price, but even when they are back in stock, the costs of shipping from UK to US probably makes it infeasible. Does anyone know of suppliers of similar poles here in the US?
Thanks, Jens. Could you please provide some suggested suppliers or weblinks?
You’ll find plenty on eBay. But be careful as some Chinese vendors have badly calibrated tape measures and a 5m pole may only be 3.9m. Having heard of such problems the last one I bought on eBay shipped from China was a 6.3m item that measures just over 5m. Which was the length I wanted.
Forewarned is forearmed as an old mentor of mine would say.
