Thank you to all chasers for contacts during our recent mini expedition to the Northern Pennines and Lake District.
We started on the 6th March with Cracoe Fell and straight away ran into a problem. On setting up we discovered that the FT817 was not receiving power from the external battery. There was little power in the internal battery which had not been charged. The weather was bitter–snow on the top and sleet/ snow falling in a stiff breeze. There was just enough power in the internal battery to make the minimum 4 contacts on the lowest power setting before the battery died altogether. On checking further back at our vehicle, I decided the problem was not the battery but internal to the 817. This required a return home (Sheffield) to fix–about 3 hours in fact. A printed track near the external power connector had broken. A solder bridge fixed the problem.
On Sunday we drove back to the Dales. The weather was now much improved–high pressure, blue skies and sun for the whole of the remaining activations, though always very cold.
The hard winter had left a lot of snow around, much of it hard neve. We took and on occasions used, ice axe and crampons. A number of ‘casual hill walkers’ had to turn back from a number of summits due to snow and ice.
We suffered a second problem when after a few days our camera stopped working. Normally we try to get a photo of each summit if possible–to put on the SOTA Flickr site; we were not able to record the later activations from this trip which is a pity as the weather was great and peaks such as the Old Man of Coniston were particularly fine in full winter garb.
List of activations;
6/3/10 Cracoe Fell NP-032
7/3/10 Calf Top NP-022
8/3/10 The Calf NP-013 (Does this make a 'herd’of summits?
8/3/10 Yarlside NP-019
9/3/10 Blencathra LD-008
9/3/10 Little Mell Fell LD-037
10/3/10 Dale Head LD-020
10/3/10 Robinson LD-021
11/3/10 High Raise LD-019
12/3/10 Old Man of Coniston LD-013
13/3/10 Whitfell LD-032
Gordon, G0EWN