Unfinished Business - G/SC-010 Dundry Down - OARC SOTA Activity Day

Activation Reports
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As part of the OARC SOTA Activity day, I was going to work another summit, but the changeable weather, and my previous failure to activate G/SC-010 Dundry Down meant that I was fated to choose this summit.

I’ll keep this brief as this is a well known summit, but I do have to write down just how hard this summit can be on FM. Last time I was up there I could only my 3 QSOs and they were very local due to massive pager break-in on 2m from the various antenna up on the hill top.

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So this time, I can to fight… Instead of a 5W HT and a rubber duck, I brought the Kenwood TM-V71 (50W on 2m FM) and a slim jim and 6m pole.

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I found a nice post to tie my pole too and got operating. I made about five contacts with some ease, only a little bit of pager breakthrough and I only needed to run 25W. Then disaster… My battery died, no matter, I have a spare, so I connect that up and then disaster number two… I lost my logging sheet.

It just blew out of my hands and off over a fence and down the hill…

Luckily I was able to get four more contacts and activate the hill. Phew!

Some typical Dundry pics to finish. The Suspension Bridge and one of a cow, the church tower and an aircraft landing at Bristol Airport.

73s

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Hi Simon,

So that’s why you disappeared off the air in the way that you did!!!

As you say…… those masts do seem to interfere a bit. They were in between us and that probably explains your scratchy signal to me. So…… it was good to work you again and enable you to activate Dundry Down at last.

Fyi, I was trying out a recently acquired used Yaesu VX-170 which, on max, only seemed to be pushing out 3w so I struggled to work you with the slim jim but switching to the 3e beam saved the day. 73

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Indeed, I had four different sets of walkers to chat with, a battery failure and then I had to chase my logging sheet.

A pleasure to work you, although it was a struggle to get that callsign out of the noise, we succeeded in the end!

Delighted to have got you on 3W.

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