50 grand would buy you a mid tier EV or a SOTAcopter. Minus running costs, repairs, pilot license and hangar storage for a chopper but I digress… 
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Ach, I’m sure once I part exchange my rusty old Skoda I’ll be well on my way.
Virtually ready to sign off for flight.
Cheap enough for spares.
It’s “virtually ready” and “cheap enough”, what could possibly go wrong?
Just need to speak to my pals at Ben Alder Estate and see if they’ll let me use their underground hangar - just about in the ideal spot in the heart of GM/CS, and well within range of plenty of ES/WS/SS hills too.
Image by Rob Burke on Geograph
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Just as well your RF was going nowhere near them! My gut feeling (it’s a big gut) would expect a 400m ASL to 550m ASL QSO even with Arran in the way to work reasonably reliably every day with about 25W erp SSB at each end (5W small Yagi). I not expect a 100-ish mile QSO on FM with “better than rubber duck” antennas to be that much less reliable. The path is over water about 40% of the time so typical marine ducting would help.
It’s reasonable to assume your RF was leaving at least 10deg above the horizon and so by the time you travel 43km to the main ridge on Arran, your RF would be about 7.5km above ground. It could have entered a duct by then. But I’d more suspect normal everyday troposcatter did the business for you.
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I think I’ll just save up and buy an antigravity lift belt when the scientific advances promised by the AI enthusiasts come to pass! (Or a negative gravity anvil for Andy!)
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My haircut’s certainly more Dr. Evil than Anthea Turner.
That’s good to know, thanks for the advice. I’ve clearly still got a lot to learn in terms of propagation, and it’s good to have a community of knowledgeable folk who’re able to steer a muppet like me in the right direction!
And we can pay for it all in NFTs, brilliant!
Based on the locator given on the POTA site for Ardgillan Castle and Demesne Regional Park @EI3LH and I were 262km apart which is good for a handheld (or two?). But I notice that it is not marked as P2P on the POTA site because you logged the wrong callsign for me. You missed off the /P so it sees it as a hunt and not a P2P. You should always log under the exact callsign used. G4TGJ and G4TGJ/P are different callsigns. (This is not a POTA specific issue).
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That is some going for HT to HT! Thanks for the heads up, POTA support are normally pretty good at fixing that stuff. Normally I’d have it 99.9% in PoLo so my bad!
I’ll get it corrected and re-upload. 