After having finished my duties, the weather looked nice and I decided to go activate a nice summit less than 20Km North-West of Pamplona.
I activated this summit once in 2015 and the last activation was done by Santi EA2BSB (SK) and Jorge EA2LU in 2017, three and a half years ago.
I drove the 16Km from my QTH to the village of Ochovi:
After parking by the small cemetery of the village, I followed the track shown in this map, with an elevation gain of about 300m:
The hike along the ridge was like this:
After a bit more than an hour, the summit was reached:
These are the views towards the North:
This is the valley down to the North:
And these to the South:
I forgot taking a picture of my setup, but it was the usual 14m long endfed wire as a sloper from the top of my 7m long telescopic fishing rod towards the East to a 9:1 unun and a 6m long counterpoise wire extended on the grass.
The activation was CW only on 30, 40 and 20m and it went as follows:
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30m CW: 16 QSOs, 1 of which S2S, after about 15 minutes QRV.
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40m CW: 8 QSOs after about 8 minutes QRV.
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20m CW: 5 QSOs, 1 of which S2S, after about 8 minutes QRV.
All in all, 29 QSOs, 2 of which S2S after about 50 minutes QRV.
You can see it on this map:
The weather changed rapidly with a cold wind from the North and the clouds developing in the sky, so given the little number of chasers, I decided not to make it longer trying other bands and modes because it wasn’t pleasant at all in the summit.
See the clouds wrapping now the summits in the distance:
The SOTA summit name is Bizkai, but it is also called Oskia:
During descent, I met a fox only about 15m in front of me, but, as you can imagine, it swiftly run away before I even thought about taking my phone for a picture. It was a very beautiful fox with a great tail.
When I was nearly ending my descent, I took this panoramic towards the South where you can see circled in red the city of Pamplona in the distance and a red arrow pointing to the place where I parked my car:
The degradation of the weather continued and we have got some rain in the afternoon-evening. It’s great that I could squeeze an activation before the arrival of the rain.
Thanks dear chasers for your calls and QSOs. I’ll be looking forward to copying you all again soon from a summit.
73,
Guru
