Juggling the family diary to find a space which would allow a few nights away, combined with a spot of decent weather and all limbs functioning within normal parameters is a difficult combination to achieve, so I didn’t tempt fate with anything other than a quiet set of alerts.
Managed to set off on the Wednesday morning at 7, with a fairly tight schedule to try and climb Meall-nan-Tarmachan on arrival. 5 minutes into the plan there as a problem with one of the local roads shut (It turns out for Fibre Broadband…), unfortunately this resulted in a 20 mile detour!
The next challenge was the weather. Having driven through good weather it was a bit disappointing to arrive in rain and wind, although it did meant that the National Trust car park for Ben Lawres was nearly empty. I have climbed this hill before, well at least my old Munroe book has it ticked off, but I didn’t remember it. The walk to the summit was straightforward, even with the two spaniels . I decided to put the mast up - despite the rain and qualified the hill on 2m, but as it briefly stopped raining I also went on 40m which had tolerable propagation. A short walk down the hill, and then the minor challenge of navigating the A827 in the camper. The A827 seems to have been designed for two horses to pass comfortably. It is one of those roads that isn’t quite two lanes wide apart from the narrow bits, so attempting to keep the still shiny, but not so new any longer camper in the same condition requires some concentration…particularly after a 200 mile drive, and a 600m ascent and decent.
Leaving the NT car park up to GM/CS-015
The summit, and two very under-impressed Spaniels…
Jared (2E0JFJ) had contacted me so the plan for the next day was to climb Ben Lawres and try a S2S with Jared. Jared is quite a lot faster than I am and I met him as he was on the way up. For about 100m of vertical ascent I managed to keep up, but I’m afraid the 61 turns do seem to have limited my top speed and although a multi summit ascent is possible, it would probably result in the next three weeks of incapacitation…so Jared set up on the summit first. I should say that the path is very easy as is the navigation. I skirted Beinn Ghlas to try and keep the legs intact…
Ben Lawres GM/CS-001 in better weather
Jared made loads of contacts on 2m with no faff , an RH770 on an new FT-65 wheres I demonstrated the old school way of doing it by knitting an interesting pattern with the linked dipole, 2m J Pole 4 guys and two Spaniels. After a bit if a faff we managed to get the linked dipole up and working and Jared operated HF on a rather flat 40m with the KX2.
As Jared disappeared along the ridge I then tried 2m and then 40 and 20. 20m was defiantly the better band although the pile up was hard work.
On the way down I had a look at the climb from the bealach to Meall Corranaich which was my plan for Friday. Given the state of the legs the thought of getting up and down with two Spaniels seemed a little bit challenging. On the walk back from pub after meeting Jared that evening it seemed much too challenging so a plan B was needed.
A quick look on SOTL.AS showed Creag Gharbh, which seemed to be walkable from Killin, so that became the new plan. With hindsight I could have parked the camper much closer to the hill (anyone repeating this there seemed to be lots of places to park on the road on the S side of Loch Tay, and if you are brave there are no signs prohibiting driving all the way up to Lochan Breaclaich. It was actually a really nice walk, and better for not being busy. There is a good track to within 800m of the summit.
Classic picture from the bridge at Killing the way to GM/SS-099. For entertainment wait until you watch a caravan reverse over it…
8km later - the summit.
The trig point is in very good condition, and still has the right size hole in the top for holding a mast. The weather was stunning, bright sunshine and enough wind to deter any insects. Once again I qualified on 2m (Jack GM4COX has a monster signal on the summits) and it was nice to have a S2S with Jared too…. 40m was disappointing but 20m rather made up for it. My first contact on 20m was 59 to the south coast of England, and I even managed a S2S to a GW summit as well as European DX and even more S2S contacts. Was this the result of the SFI being over 200? More short skip due to more diffraction?
The antenna. As no one was watching everything worked the first time…
The decent was - well hot, according to the van (never truly reliable) 26C outside
All in all I probably preferred activating GM/SS-099 to the other summits. As I write this (on Friday night) I think my best bet tomorrow is to give the dogs a short walk and go home, so unless I wake up feeling - well better than I do now so no alerts tomorrow.
Now the LORA bit…. Thanks to Richard I have a nice little tracker which seems to be behaving well - apart from charging but that is probably user error….
I also got 2 Lilygo modules, one of which I originally programmed as a igate, and the other as a digipeater. The home QTH is a bit rubbish for 70cm so coverage was as expected, but at least I was able to prove the digipeater was working - relaying signals from one side of the house to another.
Plan B was to configure a device (G4IPB-11) as a mobile digpeater. I have quite a good nether 4G wireless router in the van so the internet works well and I the manually put in the lat / long of the station into the configuration menu. (The digipeaters were programmed from the excellent CA2RXU website)
Day 1 GM/CS-015. Due to rubbish weather and late arrival LORA didn’t happen
Day 2 GM/CS-001. Well the tracker seemed to be functioning, as did the mobile gate, but not a single packet appeared. Fault finding in the evening (before the pub) showed I had not typed the password in properly (I transposed 2 digits) so the packets were not being logged. Tried it later and it did log to the pub…
Day 3, now with the igate jammed in the window and an RH770 inserted and…. Well the tracker was flat. I carry a small USB booster (backup for the phone - never needed) and now seemed a good time to try it. It worked and I was tracked for most of the route, the missing bits being when there is a hillside in the way. So not a vast range (6km) , but the mobile igate worked (even parked at the bottom of the hill with a compromised antenna…
Q. If I am going to make a proper mobile igate which units incorporate a GPS, so even if I transpose a number the gate does not appear in the Indian oven……?
- Paul
