Dear friends
I’m back home after 10 days in mountains.
I planed to activate french new ones, starting with F/AM region, in the “Massif des Ecrins”. The word “Ecrin” means “jewel case”, so you can imagine that it is a very lovely place. The higher summit is the “Barre des Ecrins” at 4102m; we often say that is is the higher french summit, but only if we consider the whole massif of course…Mont Blanc massif is half french, half italian.
The WX was not very good, but I could climb 2 rather high summits, F/AM-171 with fresh snow at 2700m, and F/AM-273 at 2563m.
It is a real pleasure, after 4 or 5 hours climbing, when you are alone on a summit, to exchange few words with friends, so I only can say a very big thanks to all.
I had QSO with usual chasers, and some newcomers in SOTA, fine !
Then I went 4 days in F/PE region, near Montpellier; there mountains are not high; no climbing there but only hiking. When on a summits, one can see the Mediteranean sea!
I tried 20 and 30m band, but propagation was not very good. Some days, the noise was very high on 40m, not usual when you are far from towns or electric lines.
During these 10 days, I activated 22 summits, mainly new ones.
Special thanks to G4SSH for our 21 QSO. Roy missed only F/PE-333.
Then comes G3WPF Reg with 17 QSO, ON4CAP Andre & GWODSP Mike with 16 QSO.
There are 670 QSO in my log.
I had 9 S2S QSO; not very easy because some chasers want to earn their points (I can understand that) and others who could not hear me. On the other side, some friends helped me to reach the S2S, sending info to the other station such as DL4FDM; thanks Fritz!
3 nice S2S with GS0OOO/P on GM/WS-001, WS-002 and WS-003, thanks John !
Thanks also to all spotters, specialy during the RTTY contest… I was very disappointed because spotlite didn’t work and I couldn’t send that I was calling on 7013! I was thinking that I could not qualify the summit.
I tried some calls on 7032 between 2 big kalachnikovs… fortunatly OK1AOU Jaroslav could listen to me and he sent a spot when I QSY on 7013. Then the pile up began…
I had some problems with my video when I was in the Ecrins; the Li-Ion batteries don’t like cold ! I often got “Low battery” when I was on summits. So I will try to put short video on line soon.
In F/PE, temperature was very hot (about 23 to 25°C) and video worked well. I will put on line a video on F/PE-281 the famous “Pic Saint Loup”. There you will see a nice green “demoiselle” in love with me…
Best 73 to all
Alain F6ENO