After 4 chemo sessions already in my body and after the successful activation I carried out the day before, I felt strong enough and in the mood to try a new SOTA activation before the winter bonus period ends and I planned this 6 pointer, which is a 70Km drive from my QTH, but it’s a drive-up summit as long as you have a 4x4 vehicle or some off-road driving skills to carefully drive the very broken road up to the top.
The only problem is that the chemo treatments have produced some wounds in my tongue and speaking has become a painful activity when my tongue wound gets rubbing my teeth. This is the reason why my activations yesterday and today have been CW only.
When I got to the summit, there still were some snow patches and although the temperature was not too cold, it was very, very windy (as usual here) so I got dressed as in pure winter to avoid getting any cold.
My setup today was a sloper 14m long endfed wire hung from the top of a 7m long fishing rod to a 9:1 unun with a 6m long counterpoise wire extended on the grass.
My rig was FT-817ND at 5W with a MFJ-941B antenna tuner.
Battery was LiFePo4 4S2P.
The operation started with a S2S on 30m logged while I was eating my lunch. The whole operation went as follows:
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30m CW: 1 S2S QSO while eating my lunch.
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20m CW: 9 QSOs after about 20 min QRV and CQing.
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30m CW: 17 QSOs after more than 20 minutes QRV and CQing.
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40m CW: 4 QSOs after about 15 minutes QRV and CQing.
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20m CW: 7 QSOs after about 15 minutes QRV and CQing.
I also called CQ for about 10 minutes on 60m CW but nobody responded.
After about 1h20 minutes on air, 38 QSOs, 1 of which was a S2S and 1 was DX with Canada.
@KT5X called me several times and I always responded to him with his callsign and signal report, but conditions were tough and my tiny signal didn’t seem to get through, so he never got back to me and he never made it to my log. NIL.
This is the full log:
You can see it on the map:
Before leaving the summit, I took a few pictures in which you’ll notice the sky looking cloudy, but the weather people say it was sand from the Sahara dessert brought by the South winds:
Thanks dear chasers for your calls and QSOs. I’ll be looking forward to copying you all again soon from a SOTA.
73,
Guru