First I’d like to thank all people trying to contact me yesterday while I was activating reference I/TN-305, specially the one I heard in the noise calling for “italian sota”.
I’m sorry, It simply was a bad luck day:
as soon as I installed the doublet antenna and sent the first spot on sotawatch I had to fight with the tuner which simply didn’t powerup, YES! I tested it the day before, YES it was working and YES the battery was full. Anyway, after a few attempts I give up with it and changed antenna to the linked dipole which does not need the tuner, new spot, a couple of contacts then a gust of wind turned the coax enough to break the connection to one half …
At least the swr was not too high so I could continue transmitting but I had no more contacts, in more than one hour I could only collect the last contact needed for the activation.
I’ll probably be there once again in September to introduce some ham friends to SOTA, hope in better luck 
73 to all de IZ3GME Marco
