Dear all,
As I had announced, a business trip to Portugal gave me the chance to activate a couple of summits which were not too far from where I was.
As soon as I finished my meeting and a bit later than scheduled, I headed to the Serra da Freita, which I found easy and quickly thanks to the GPS after around 75 Km drive.
Weather was nice with warm temperature, very little breeze, sunshine and clouds. Just perfect to be in the mountains and do SOTA.
The security check at the Pamplona airport didn’t let me go inside the plane with my GP antenna, so I had to leave it in my car and I could only carry a long wire.
At the summit, I extended the long wire and managed to keep it more or less slopy to the West without touching ground at any point.
When I switched my rig ON and tuned on 10.118, I found DF3MC/P CQing from a Summit. We made QSO and exchanged Summit references but his resulted in a non SOTA reference (DA/WS-078). No problem though. Although not a Sota to Sota QSO, it was a Summit to Summit contact anyway.
Immediately after this, I logged my good friends Alfonso, EA4CWN, who put a very strong signal, and Javier, EA2GM, who was a bit weaker but perfectly copiable. Thanks guys! Very glad to work you again after quite a long time.
It was a Monday and a not very numerous number of regular European chasers followed, including TOP EA2 chaser Manuel, EA2DT.
When there were no more chasers on 30m CW, I QSYed to 20m SSB.
There, I had the pleasure of a S2S contact with Nuno, CT1IUV/P, activating CT/BA-012. Thank you!
Some more regular European chasers were logged and even a DX AC1Z from NH, USA, thank you!
Thanks a lot to all of you. This is the full log of this activation:
When no more chasers called in, I went QRT packed up and before running towards the next Summit I took some pictures which I’m going to share with you.
Best 73 de Guru.