It was at 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, April 24th, when my friend Wolfram, PY2BND, left for São Roque, in the state of São Paulo and after one and a half hour drive and a last stretch of a reasonable dirt road, we reached the base of the Morro do Saboó. We managed to find a place for the car in one of the two parking spaces and started the ascent.
The trail is very easy to navigate, but you walk 1.1km to climb 158m, and at the end there is a steep section, nothing very technical, but because of this the trail qualifies as moderate.
At the summit we had enough space to set up our antennas and the station and no matter where you decide to put it, the view of the mountains is fantastic!
We started operating on 40m and made some contacts, but the 10m band seemed much more active, so we looked for a little space among the many other stations to try to do some DX with our 8W mcHF. We decided to share the contacts, passing the mic to each other. It worked until a pileup formed and we didn’t realize we were creating a mess! Lesson learned, better to take turns operating to be more efficient and not frustrate colleagues who are trying to close a contact with our station.
After a lunch, coffee and a relaxed chat, we closed some more DX. We made not more than 25 contacts, but all of them of great quality: France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, Czech Republic, USA, Spain, Argentina and, of course, several colleagues from Brazil. The cherry on the cake was an S2S with PY2VM who was activating PY2SE-011!
Station
Radio: mcHF 8W
Power: 4 cell LiFePo4 battery
Antenna: Endfed Half Wave in inverted L configuration at 6m height
All homebrewed.
Operators
Wolfram, PY2BND
Guillermo/Bill, PY2BIL
