With an absolutely perfect weather this afternoon and a forecast for thunderstorms on Saturday afternoon-evenning and temperatures dropping plus rain all day on Sunday, I told to myself that I should not miss this opportunity to activate this afternoon-evenning.
I finished work at 14h30 (EA) 12h30 utc, as we usually do on Fridays, then I had lunch and later I went to pick up my kids to school. We got home by 17h30 (EA) 15h30 and I quickly changed my clothing, prepared the necessary stuff into my SOTA kit and got into the car ready for one of these nearby drive-on summits.
I could choose a 1, a 2 or a 4 pointer nearly equidistant from my QTH.
As I left home with my dog Lucho in the car boot and started to drive, I didn’t know yet which summit I was going to, but I suddenly decided that I would offer the 4 pointer to my dear chasers today.
When I had just started the drive up along the ridge on the road NA-6056, which you will see on the image below, I stopped at the circled spot, which is where the pilgrimate route to Santiago de Compostela coming from Pamplona passes the Erreniega ridge on its way to the valley of Valdizarbe, where my QTH is and then follows its way to the West.
These are some pictures I took at such spot:
Monument to the pilgrims sake.
View to the North, the area we call “cuenca of Pamplona” with the city of Pamplona visible in the distance.
View to the South, the valley of Valdizarbe where my QTH is.
When I got to the summit, I set up my home made 6m band 5/8 wave vertical antenna with the help of a trypod as well as the multiband endfed wire antenna. I even took a comfortable seat for me today.
At one point during my HF activation, three young men arrived to the summit on their BTT and I asked them to take some pictures of me with my camera. So they did and I then corresponded taking with their phone some pictures of them with their BTT machines.
It really felt like summer this afternoon-evenning, with blue sky and a nice sunshine warming us up to 25-26° C with just a very gentle breeze. One of those very few perfect days we catch over the year. I’m glad that I could enjoy it playing SOTA.
I had good cell phone signal, so I managed to post an alert and then selfspots for each of the frequencies/modes I wished to work on.
The activation started on 6m SSB, where I could only log one single QSO with Jorge EA2LU in Pamplona. Just line of sight contact.
About 20 minutes later I QSYed to 20m SSB, where I logged 6 QSOs. Here I need to let Lazaros SV2FLM know that I didn’t log him because, although I copied him perfectly, I clearly noticed that he didn’t copy me at all, as he didn’t talk to me in the right time, he doubled with me once and he never replied to me when I asked him to confirm reception of my signal report. He just said thank you, 73. Well, I’m sorry but that wasn’t a good contact to my understanding, I’m afraid.
After nearly 15 minutes on 20m SSB, I QSYed to 30m CW, where I worked 4 more stations in 5 minutes. After a few unresponded CQ calls, I decided to QSY to 40m CW.
40m CW produced 6 more QSOs.
When no more chasers called in I decided to give 6m a new try. This time on CW, but I had not a single call after more than 20 minutes CQing.
Finally I returned to 20m but this time on CW, where I logged 3 contacts.
It was 18h39 utc when I logged the last QSO and the Sun was very low by then, so after a few more unresponded CQ calls, I decided to call it a day and made QRT to pack up and descend.
This is the full log of today’s:
Thank you very much dear chasers and I look forward to hearing you soon again.
Best 73 from Guru