Sitting here by the radio thinking god this slow today
Another couple points required to reach me target
Then this voice appeared on 14285 calling CQ Sota 9H3WJ/p
Boy did ones ears prick up and reach for the mike
Surprised to reach alone get in there with one call
he he still one point short of target
KarlWell done Karl, I was away from home unfortunately so missed the 9H/GO-001 Malta(Gozo) station.
Did you hear the Ukranian and Iranian stations earlier on 14.285 - not SOTA of course, but interesting to see who pops up on that frequency. When I was back in Australia, I used to leave the rig tuned to 7.090 MHz as that’s where most SOTA activations came up and if it was busy, 5,10 or 15 KHz above or below this frequency. A SOTA “calling frequency” almost. With all the extra activity in Europe this isn’t possible unfortunately, at least not on 40m or 20m.
73 Ed.
PS Lets hope 9H3WJ (or someone else) also activates 9H/MA-001 as well otherwise the association wont count for Mountain Hunter as you need to contact 2 summits and there are only two SOTA summits in Malta, one on Gozo and one on Malta. Looking at the maps 9H/MA-001 is on a main bus route it seems - no difficulty getting to that summit!
Actually 2 different summits. A number of people have questioned why an association hasn’t appeared in their results when they have chased the association twice. It’s this fact that has caught people out. It does raise a pending problem for W5M which is a single summit association. If there’s only 1 summit how can you work 2 different ones? I don’t have a good solution for this yet but when I do, expect to see many US chaser’s Mountain Hunter status jump up.
No hear the stations you mentioned but freq was busy earlier in morning with an Italian castle SES.
And thats how the mountain hunter works right learnt something new today
Karl
Pity you got his callsign wrong, Karl.
73,
Walt (G3NYY)
Karl, your log has quite a few simple errors in it, mainly typos which are very easy to make. You should login in to the database and view your own chaser log. At the top there is a checkbox “show unconfirmed only”. Click that then click show and it will show you all the contacts that you have logged that do not seem to match an activator’s log. You should review all the contacts in there against the activator’s log to see what is wrong and then correct your log.
For example, there are date errors, incorrect callsigns and confusion between 0 and O. Not all the errors are in your log however, in one case the activator has logged himself in the wrong country through a simple keystroke error. If the database shows the contact as unconfirmed the error could be in your log or the activator’s log. You can only fix your own log however.
You’re not the only person with errors, I spotted some typos in my own log over the weekend which I have still to correct, such as people with M4 calls instead of G4 and I think I have logged G4OBK as G3OBK on more than one occasion!
Wouter Jan PE4WJ and I are on Malta for a CEPT meeting, that will start tomorrow. Today we had great fun on Gozo’s summit 9H/GO-001, a full day with public transportation. 9H3WJ/P worked on 20 CW and SSB. 9H3BT/P was on all other bands 40-10. I tried SSB and CW on 40 but was unable to make one single contact on that band. We both made 49 QSO’s with our KX-3’s with a Half Wave Endfed. Stations were less than 50 meters apart.
If we can sneak out of the meetings we will try to activate Malta’s summit 9H/MA-001 later this week. If that doesn’t work then there is another CEPT meeting on Malta the first week of February. Tomorrow night we will attend a MARL club meeting, where we will do a small presentation on our CEPT work.
73, Hans PB2T & 9H3BT
Yes agreed Andy - two different summits within the association. That was the point I was trying to make that to qualify as having worked Malta for Mountain hunter validity both 9H/GO-001 and 9H/MA-001 must be worked.
Ed.
Thanks folks
terrible one is at times 
karl
Hi Andy,
A difficult one but all rules need at least one exception. Maybe if an association has been admitted but definitely has only 1 peak - no others that might qualify if a lower prominence height were applied - then the rule exception might be that the association is completed when the peak is worked. ie it is what it is, a 1 peak association. The data base guy would need to put in an exception test, just a bit of shuffling about really.
However to make it of similar difficulty to other associations you might want to add the rider that the association is recoded in the results as worked when the summit has been worked twice. You might also want to have an extra condition such as the two contacts must not be in the same calendar year. This of course requires some deft dancing about by the database guy. How’s your quickstep Andy?
An alternative quick fix would be to give the peak two identities and requiring only one to be used per activation. This would require the MT and the AM to do the dancing and is a bit messier than the one summit is all approach.
The present approach, embraced by managers everywhere in all fields of endeavor, is to continue to do nothing. Usually they don’t mention it. Basil Faulty at least understood that. Who mentioned the flaw?
73
Ron
VK3AFW
Really looking forwards to that one.
Expecting major pile up.
thanks again
karl
It’s not going to happen this week Karl. At the moment we participate in a social event, organised by our hosts. First sightseeing stop is Dingli cliffs only 500 meters from the summit. We should have known…
Anyway, it gives us the a chance to do a small recce and there is a good chance that you will hear us 2 February.
73 Hans 9H3BT
Thanks for the heads up
look forwards to it
Karl
Hans, happy to work you in so many bands. Just to ask you which antenna were you using, as your signal was almost always stronger than Jan’s.
73 de Mikel (not only carrots eats Man )
Hi Mikel,
That’s very interesting information.
We both used an endfed antenna with 10 meters of wire. Setup very much the same.
20 and 10 meters were the best bands.
Two weeks ago I did not operate on 20. Both of us 49 QSO’s
This time I started on 20 meters and ended up with 92 QSO’s
Wouter Jan made 33 QSO’s. Quite a difference.
We will take a closer look at the un-uns. Mine is from PAR endfed. 9H3WJ’s is home brew
For what it is worth, you can use this too:
http://www.on6zq.be/w/index.php/SOTA/SOTAcheck
"SOTA callsigns checker
This program takes a log in the SOTA comma delimited text format (Activator / Chaser) that you intend to upload to the SOTA Results and Summits Database and checks if the callsigns are already known as chasers or activators.
You might want to double check the unknown ones."
Thanks Hans, got you today (2nd. Feb) on MA-001 - now if I had only been around earlier to catch you when you were on Gozo … 9H/GO now goes on my “look out for” list on my shack wall.
73 Ed.
Hello Hans,
Thanks for going onto SSB mode ~~~ /MA-001.
Much appreciated.
Best wishes and night night.
Mike
My pleasure Mike. It looks like we will meet in Romania.
Hello Mikel,
Thanks for the observation, and nice to work you on multiple bands today!
Judging from the reports I got, I did get the impression that my signals where slightly down indeed, except on 10m where I got some 599 reports. Hans and I have been discussing un-uns today, and were wondering what kind of magic is inside Hans’ endfed matchbox (we considered opening the unit to take a look but did not do it since it has no screws and the only option would be breaking it open… perhaps someone has an idea?
If I am correct, Hans uses the LNR Precision trail friendly end fed.
My homebrew endfed matchbox consists of a trifilar wound 1:9 (auto-)transformer on a 4C65 core (which is what I happened to have laying around and it fit in the plastic case hi). Probably this is not optimal, so I may need to do some work there. Most important requirement is that I want to be able to work multiple bands with one antenna (without links if possible), using the KX3 internal ATU.
I have used a dipole before which worked very well, but I like the simplicity of the endfed for operating portable.
73,
Wouter Jan 9H3WJ