Thanks to everybody who took the trouble to listen for me, and apologies to those who didn’t get a contact. Takeoff from this hill is really restricted on VHF - I walked right up to the summit to give it the best chance, but it was still difficult! Did eventually qualify it on 2m ssb thanks to a 2x1 from M3PXW - it doesn’t come much more marginal than that!
Managed to break the BNC plug off the 60m dipole, but by the time I’d walked back to the car I had the bright idea of clipping the Sotabeam lead to the dipole coax, so walked back up the hill into the activation zone and got somewhat belatedly operational on 60m. Managed another seven contacts on a rapidly declining band, it was nearly dark by the time I left the hill.
A wonderful evening, thanks again to all you chasers who made it so.
Sorry to have missed you Gerald, there were a couple of stations just detectable in the noise but not even reaching R1. Now if I’d had a key with me and the skill and bottle to use it…
The trees stop below the summit, so from the very top you’re beaming more or less over them but you can see higher hills virtually surrounding this one. Bring your linear when you tackle it!
There’s a strange little stone monument at the very summit, looks like a gravestone with MWM carved into it. There was a similar one right next to the trig on Mynydd Twyn-Glas. Any idea what these are? Never seen the like before!
Thanks for the description of the site. Yes the BNOS will be taken, Hi!
As far as the monument is concerned, perhaps it’s a relics of an ancient by-gone SOTA age… MWM is an acronym for Multi Wavelength Meter. Obviously someone forced to use more than one band to qualify the summit! Perhaps voice, whistle, drum and smoke signals were used.
73, Gerald
P.S. From the hill-bagging website, John Edwards states: "Obvious high point seemed near a boundary stone marked MWM and underneath graffiti “AM 1980 Feb 17”. (Nowt’s sacred.)
And for Mynydd Twyn-Glas from John Edwards: “Trig (BM 2978) beyond mast and British Gas station with PP / LVP boundary stone nearby.”