Apologies to all who missed me today. I had to go qrt for safety reasons. The 25minutes of activity were between two thunderstorms. The first one hit me during my ascent around 100 metres below the summit with gale force winds, heavy rain and lightning (which luckily didn’t get closer than “counting to three”).
A small ledge sheltered me sufficiantly, so I decided to stay and wait. After good 15 minutes the lightshow was over, I continued my ascent and finally reached the summit. Unfortunately the heavy winds persisted, driving the rain almost horizontally, attempting to blow off anything that was not fixed.
The visibility was virtually zero and I soon had clumsy fingers from the wet and cold wind. I managed to find a somewhat acceptable place to set up the rig and started to call on 30m but soon had to learn that the band was almost unusable due to extremely heavy, buzzing, static noise. I hoped to be able to hear at least stronger stations but only managed to make just one qso. To fight my demotivation I decided to qsy to 40m.
The fact that the wind was getting so howling loud that I sometimes couldn’t even hear my own tx sidetone wasn’t very helpful either. But at least the qrn was getting lower and to my pleasure I was able to complete 13 other qso. Unfortunately there was new thunder approaching quickly, so I had to call it a day, packed up as quickly as I could and left…
73 Bernhard DL4CW