Loughrigg Fell G/LD-047

Activation Reports
1

An early morning trip up Loughrigg Fell G/LD-047. Weather reports were variable with the chance of rain in the afternoon, although that hasn’t passed.

I took a Toughbook with me to try some FT-8. At 4KG it isn’t the lightest of options but it is actually helping me with some physio on my right arm.

IMG_20200614_080445_7
IMG_20200614_080445_74608×3456 2.51 MB

Path up from Loughrigg Tarn

IMG_20200614_081436_7
IMG_20200614_081436_73456×4608 2.31 MB

Probably a fairly unusual sight!

FT8 worked fairly well, although pskreporter was hearing my calls much better than I seemed to be doing with actual QSOs.

IMG_20200614_092857_8
IMG_20200614_092857_84608×3456 2.41 MB

pskreporter
pskreporter1024×768 542 KB

Thank you to all the chasers on 20m, 40m & 80m.
The 3G card in the Toughbook makes for some good reading on top of fells :wink:

IMG_20200614_101517_3
IMG_20200614_101517_34608×3456 1.78 MB

Lots of folk turned up at around 11am, as expected, with a nice day in the Lake District.

Next weekend was meant to be the SOTA LD weekend. There may well be some SOTA folk out, if the weather is reasonable I will try and do an activation.

Kind regards, Mark. M0NOM

10 Likes
2

Ooh look…its me at the top of that list. Got up early and everything :grinning:

Nice day out today. A few more on 2m ssb as well.

Alex

3 Likes
3

Looks spectacular Mark.

I’ve tried a variety of “inexpensive” (i.e heavy, unreadable, batteries that last a nano second…) laptops and in the end through a little more cash at the problem and rather like the utility of the MS SurfaceGo to take on SOTA. At 10 lb your laptop is quite heavy, physio or not!

1 Like
4

Hi Paul, no I wouldn’t recommend the Toughbook as a ‘felltop accessory’! I could probably have done what I needed with FT8 on my mobile phone. However - you will not find a better device for a readable screen in bright sunlight. I took my old model CF-30, the new one I have now CF-31 Mk4 has a 1,200 nit LED backlit screen. I’ve had to turn it down a notch in bright sunlight because it was too bright :scream:

Awesome piece of kit. For me outdoor computing is as much fun as outdoor radio. Well, not quite…

M.

5

That is a quite a specialist piece of gear and almost up in price as Flex or K4.

What prompted you to get one?

Paul

6

Hi Paul

Toughbooks can be had second hand for a good price, if you play the waiting game. The CF-31 Mk4 I bought recently had been used for a total of 190 hours (they have an hours count in the BIOS) and was £325. The processor in it is around 5 years old but as you know for most applications now advances in processor power don’t really make much odds unless you need multi-core.

There are three main disadvantages:

  • The super-bright screen is low resolution at 1024x768. Before Windows 10 that was an issue but now everything is rendered via scaling it works fine (within limits). No issues with Linux, everything is supported.
  • The HDMI output maximum resolution is below 4k (something like 1900x1200). This is a limit of the CPU’s built in graphics processor.
  • Weight!

Mine has a 1TB SSD and 12GB RAM (upgraded by me).
I can see you’re tempted… just maybe not for SOTA.

Regards, Mark

7

I do love computer technology and in particular, software and very recently little microprocessors and the whole maker movement.

Not surprisingly I have too many devices and the Great Lockdown had me dispose of lots of things plus 3 perfectly working macBookPros dating back ages.

So I’m being super selective about what I buy as I realize the acquisition is easy but the use obligation potentially more painful!