Activating from a tent in wild weather
I’ve activated once before from a tent whilst wild camping in calm warm July weather, but this was the first time I did it in wild weather. They say You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but this old dog had to learn ‘on the job’ how to erect - and later pack away - a tent and ground sheet in a howling wind that’s trying to rip them from your hands. It must have taken at least three times longer than usual to make sure my stuff wasn’t scattered around the hillside.
Was very hard to push the pegs into the thin soil above solid rock at my local SOTA summit, Arnside Knott G/LD-058. The wind gusts at the summit which previously were trying to knock me and my 11kg pack over, were now violently distorting the tent [a Vango Banshee 200 Pro] so much I worried it might tear or collapse, but it performed very well.
It was surprisingly snug and warm inside albeit a bit damp from my wet clothes, and I was tempted to have a snooze rather than go outside again and try to get the vertical antenna up. The top of the heavy-duty Chameleon 17ft whip was bending so much on strong gusts that it was almost touching a nearby tree.
I’ve found it’s often what you don’t bring that can make or break an outdoor adventure. The tent noise due to the wind was so loud and continuous that I couldn’t properly hear the weak CW stations and that included all the transatlantic stations. I had brought my usual clip-over-ear earbud phones which don’t exclude external noise. Had I known I would have taken my bulky Koss HiFi headphones to mask out a lot of the tent noise and worked those faint T/A stations. When not keying, I was pushing an earbud further into my ear to make the Rx audio louder (the KX2 was already on maximum volume).
As it was, I worked some EU S2S (Greece and Poland) on 20m and 17m but only two T/A ones on 17m and 15m (Brazil and North Carolina).
On pack up, whilst being lashed by the wind and rain again, I didn’t seem to be able to pack everything to fit in my rucksack. I didn’t even attempt to fold up the very wet tent neatly but shoved it into its ample carry bag.
The good news is, the experience has given me the confidence that using a tent I could and will go wild-weather activating again.