Myself, N0MTN and Brad, WA6MM, hiked up with five other hams that have been interested in SOTA. We hiked and activated Chief Mountain W0C/FR-030.
The two young boys are thirteen, newer hams, and have been prolific with amateur radio. They are Brennan, K6BFL and Alex, KE0LJF. They made several VHF and HF SSB contacts yesterday and logged under the Colorado W0C association. Their Father Troy, N0TMD worked radio as well for his first activation.
Additional we had Mark, KD0BJV activating HF with Brad’s gear and Robert, N0CFM making several VHF FM and HF SSB contacts as well.
I hope we have some new W0C activators hooked on climbing and playing radio!
That’s excellent N0MTN. I can personally relate to the teenagers and the impact that SOTA can have on them. My 15 year old daughter was of the opinion that radio was a boring, old dude hobby and I got a whole lot of eye rolling whenever I mentioned it. But then I took her to a local peak and she suddenly got all animated about the adventure, wanted to talk on the radio, and got excited about the locations of each of our contacts.
While driving to school she casually dropped into our conversation that she looked up when the next test session is to get her Tech license.
Hi Mark, K7EEX, got your SOTA QSL card a few weeks and put my card in the envelope you sent. When I am at work, I don’t usually write down the signal report received.
Saw another thread where you were trying to learn CW. My CW is terrible and slow and yesterday my fingers were getting cold. I sure hope to get faster. Once the CW contact strays from RST and call signs, I get confused really fast. Hope to get up a 14er next Sunday for an activation.
I got yours as well! Thank you. Its funny, the thing I most look forward to when I get home is checking the mail and getting new QSL cards from folks that I’ve SOTA’ed with. I especially like the SOTA themed ones (like yours).
I’m making my way through CW… I’m almost done with learning all the letters and numbers. It will be just getting faster after that. I’ve been learning at 15 wpm characters with an effective rate of 5 wpm (big gaps between letters). I find it both fun and frustrating. But I am determined to be able to do activations with CW.