My 1st Qualified on S2S only. Mt Gorramakil EA2/NV-081 by EA2IF/P on 19/06/2017

Very unexpectedly I had to drive my daughter to Bayonne (France) this morning, so I decided to take a day off and take advantage of Mt. Gorramakil being right there on my way back home.
Here you can see it’s location, which is 90Km drive to the North from my QTH.

My SOTA kit had conveniently been placed in the trunk when I left home to Bayonne this morning, so I was ready to carry out an activation.

Everything was so unexpected and unplanned, with no time to almost anything, that I didn’t raise an alert.
The horizontal summit that you’ll see in the picture between the 2 closer and higher looking ones is the targetted summit of Mt. Gorramakil.

There’s a newly paved at certain sections road but quite broken at certain other sections up to the very summit, so I drove it up and set up my 7m fishing pole on one cairn in a very windy summit.

France and the Atlantic Ocean can be barely seen far in the distance.

When I was about to start my activation, I couldn’t have any 3G signal on my phone, so I couldn’t raise neither a last minute alert nor a spot.
I sent a selfspot via the SPOTmySOTA app just in case and also begged for a spot to my ham friends through whatsapp, but the message didn’t get through.
After some unresponded CQ calls on 20m CW and after finding the band very quiet around 14.062, I QSYed to 30m with the same quiet band result around 10.118.
I finally QSYed to 40m and found some activations being carried out around 7.031
I chased a couple of them, then I QSYed a few Kc up and called CQ, but after a few unresponded calls and being in a rush as usual with little time to spend before going back home, I searched around for other activators.
I found and worked 2 more activators and I had already collected the minimum 4 QSOS to qualify the activation. All of them had been S2S QSOs. This is the first time I qualify an activation with S2S QSOs only.
After this 4th QSO, I QSYed up a little bit and started CQing on a clear frequency. I immediately got a /P response, so I picked him up and there it was my 5th QSO of the day and the 5th S2S of the day.
I had spent 24 minutes in the summit to do all these 5 S2S QSOs and I decided to QRT after a few more unresponded CQ calls.
This is the log of today’s

Which is, for the first time in my life, exactly the same as the S2S log:

It was a brief but very nice time in the mountain, with very nice views like these:

Best 73,

Guru

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:+1: Those pictures are very tasty.

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Nice activation report, the views are beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

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Hello Guru,
We were lucky to get that S2S QSO. Just when you were sending your reference, “OK1LID” started sending directly on top of our frequency without even a QRL? But thanks to the find filtering on the KX2, I was able to pull your info out of the noise.
Hope to have another S2S with you soon.
73
Paul HB9DST

Hi Paul,
Yes, I also copied that strong station starting to transmit on top of our QSO but, given that the 2 tones were not exactly the same frequency, I managed to mentally filter him out and isolate your transmission to get the full message correct.
It was a pleasure for me all these S2S QSOs in such a short period of time and all of them within a few KHz on the 40m band.
Thanks to you and the other HB activators I had S2S QSO with, as you saved my activation :slight_smile:
I look forward to QSO with you, Paul, again soon.
Best 73,

Guru

The views are really nice, very attractive countryside. The S2S’s must have made for quite a memorable day.

Thanks for sharing.

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Me too… and we had it yesterday. I chased you from here with FT-817 at 5 watts and the home made endfed wire in the balcony.
.

Thanks, Paul, for the activation and QSO.

73,

Guru