Mt. Irulegi, EA2/NV-120 on 31/May/2015

During the last weekend I worked at home correcting exams and when I finished on Sunday afternoon I decided to do a quick activation as the weather was really good. I needed some fresh air…!

I decided to go to Mt. Irulegi which is close to my city and I had never been there yet.

After parking in the village of Laquidain, it took me no more than 25 minutes to reach the summit at 893 m a.s.l. There you can see the remaining stones of an ancient fortress dated on the XIII century that was built to defense the near capital city of Pamplona. This fortress suffered from
several attacks during centuries and what you can see nowadays is just the remaining wall and part of a tall tower, thanks to recent refurbishment work.

Aerial view of the reconstruction works in progress.

I seated on top of the highest point of the tower and started calling cq on VHF.

Suddenly the wind took my log 5 meter down inside this tower.
Doh! I looked for an additional paper in my rucksack but all I had was my Ham license, and after studing the tower I decided to go down and could recover my log safely.

After working some locals on VHF I moved to HF. I used a homebrew End Fed for 10-20-40 meters but I had SWR 3:1. Anyway I proceeded with the activation.

I tried 20m SSB logging a few qso. I moved to 10m but the band was closed. I returned to 20m willing to do some CW and I had to run on 14.120 MHz because of the CQ WW WPX contest in progress. After logging quite a few on CW I finished with a single qso in 40m. Total sum was 16 stations; not much but enough to keep my sota shape ;o)

Take care and VY 73
Ignacio

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