SOTA merchandise in a Swiss magazine

Hi all,

After a long battle with GoPro concerning the Hero9 audio “crackling” problem, my case got publicized by the well known Swiss consumer magazine K-Tipp.

When I went for the photo shooting in the nearby park, I wore my SOTA T-shirt on purpose, in the hope to get some publicity for SOTA. After the photo shooting, I explained the photographer about this special hobby. When he was a child, he was impressed by the amateur radio station of his neighbor and he thought that you need a huge installation to communicate so far.

This problem of the Hero9 model is well known by GoPro and is a hardware defect that can’t be fixed (their own statement). Their “solution” is to start the action cam 2-3 minutes before the action happens :rofl:

After the photo shooting about ten days ago, I sent the camera the third time to GoPro, but didn’t hear anything since then. Let’s hope that they somehow manage to return me a working camera, because that’s what they promised me after they got a call from the consumer magazine.

73 Stephan

BTW: The magazine granted me explicitly the right to publish their article.

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Your promotion worked - I ordered a T-shirt today :smiley:

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Sorry to hear about your problem with the Hero9 Stephan. Mine doesn’t “crackle”. Maybe I’m lucky, or maybe it’s beacuse I use the media mod, which has an external mic.

My Hero9 is also back with GoPro. Chipped lens, dead battery, mic. foam missing, cracked screen. All covered under warranty. :smiley:

73, Fraser

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Hi Fraser,
The crackling happens only with the microphone of the camera itself. Sorry, I’m a minimalist, but when there is wind, the mod definitely helps.
Good luck with your GoPro, here they only change something within 30 days.
73 Stephan

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In the meantime I got a working camera, hurray! :+1:

The hole story with GoPro took more than half a year. I think you believe that people call me persistent and stubborn :laughing:

I created a video with the whole story for a wider audience:

All the footage in the video was taken on SOTA summits in France, Germany, Switzerland and Austria and was recorded with one of the three GoPro Hero 9 cams.

73 Stephan

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Thanks for that very interesting video about GoPro Hero cams. Good advice to not buy one!

Geoff vk3sq

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Hi Geoff,

I don’t say the camera is rubbish, but the support and dealing with a problem of their main product was the worst I have experienced so far. And when you look at other opinions on the web (that might be biased), it doesn’t look good neither.

But other users like Fraser @MM0EFI have made good experiences with them.
And if you don’t use the internal microphone or are lucky with the correctly working production batch, the performance of this action cam is not shabby at all.

73 Stephan

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