I took my little 6 years old son to his first rock climbing training today after his 2 sisters (13 and 11 years old) decided to give it up last week.
The WX forecast was for a rainy day today and the sky was covered with thick grey clouds but it seemed to hold by the time I left my son at the rock climbing training place, so I decided to go for my 46th activation of Mt. San Cristóbal.
It was windy at the summit but not cold at all and the rain wasn’t showing, so I quickly set up my usual monoband mobile whip for 20m with a single wire radial sloping down at about 45°, connected it to my SOTA KIT with ATU MFJ-941B and FT-817ND inside.
I found 14.062 clear and I was typing on my smartphone to send a selfspot when somebody sent a QRL?
I feared someone would start using the frequency and I decided to start CQing before, even without having finished typing and sent the SMS to selfspot.
It turned out that the station asking QRL? replied my first CQ call and it was our colleague Franz OE5FSM/P who was activating OE/OO-433. Thank you Franz for your call.
We completed successfully our S2S QSO, then I finished typing on my smartphone and the spot got raised, so the pile-up became huge almost instantly.
I logged 24 QSOs in 24 minutes, 2 of which were S2S. The second S2S was at 09h43z with Juerg HB9BAB and strangely he called me again and we exchanged reports again at 09h48, only 5 minutes after our previous QSO. I guess he thought I was a different activator. I only logged the 1st QSO we made, Juerg.
This is the full log of today’s:
And this is the S2S log:
It didn’t rain and I enjoyed another nice time in the mountain and on the air.
Thanks for your calls and QSOs.
Best 73 de Guru