The bilberries are getting ripe and it is time for my annual tour though the dark woods of Sweden…
Wednesday the 28th of July I will start a two-week SOTA tour through Värmland and Dalarna Counties in Sweden. I will start with VL-023 sometime during the late afternoon the same day. Next will be VL-019 during the early morning of the 29th. After that I will activate two or three summits à day in the same manner as I did last year.
The primary aim is to activate all the new summits in Värmland County that have been added to the list this year plus the one I missed last year, that is: VL-003, VL-016, VL-017, VL-018, VL-019, VL-020, VL-021, VL-022 och VL-023. That done I will move over to the southern half of Dalarna County and work as many of them as I can. Finally I will move back to Mölndal via OR-001 and OR-002 (and perhaps OG-001). I have to be back in Mölndal the 10th of August. Theoretically I could bag as many as 36 summits, but it´s highly doubtful if I have enough stamina to do that many. 
I will use an ATS-4 with an ATS-3B.1 as backup. The output power will thus be around 4 watts. The antenna I will use will be an End Fed Half-wave with a reflector. For more info on the antenna look at the bottom of this page: http://hem.bredband.net/b101180/Portable%20end-fed.html
As last year you will find me almost exclusively on 10118 kHz. Only on rare occasions I will move down to 7032 kHz.
73 de
Håkan / SM6EQO
I and SM0GNS will try to climb Kebnekaise (SM/NB-001, highest mountain in Sweden) the coming weekend but that will be very weather depending, especially due to the fact that the expedition SA2ME had to cancel today due to snow and ice. To sum up, I’m very happy that someone is flying the SOTA-flag in Sweden. I really can’t understand why the activity is so low in SM-land. You and I have to travel 300-400 km to reach the mountains when other hams are living just nearby without bothering walking up and press the key…