I didn’t manage the full contest this time as I had other plans for the evening, so only there 1.5 hours or so. Just sat on the chair with a rather warm hat and coat. with one glove required when turning the aerial.
The ground was frozen solid once past the trees.
1 Like
i’m in the middle (ish) of IO94 and 2m is dead 99% of the time. when i lived at home with my parents I had a 5 ele beam on a rotator for 2m on the side of the house. I eventually took is down and never had a dedicated 2m rig since. Unless I’m on a summit, which is when 2m comes alive and distances increase, 2m is not alive around where i live.
When i was first licensed and an M3 i used to go to a radio club and they would all say oh i heard you calling cq the other day on 2m while i was in the shack. Not one of them had actually picked a mic up and replied to those cq’s lol!!
When i was first licensed and an M3 i used to go to a radio club and they would all say oh i heard you calling cq the other day on 2m while i was in the shack. Not one of them had actually picked a mic up and replied to those cq’s lol!!
The other day I sat on a summit calling and calling and got no answer. Back home I saw that somebody had spotted me on the dx-cluster instead of coming back to my call. 
Ahoi
Pom
I’ve occasionally spotted folk after I’ve come back to their call but they clearly havn’t heard me doing so, on the off-chance that someone who sees the spot can get a stronger signal back to them and have better luck…
1 Like
That’s nice of you. In my case, the station was nearer than 80 km. Over this distance, I even would have heard a wrong-polarised signal with my antenna lying on the ground and pointing to the wrong direction. 
Yes, 2m is alive and dead at the same time! Here in Birmingham the activity is best described as desultory, but people still seem to monitor. Back in September I called CQ SOTA from Kit Hill in Cornwall, the band had been deserted but to my surprise I managed to get six FM contacts. When I packed up the band was inactive again. People monitor and will often respond to anything out of the ordinary (only now anything heard is out of the ordinary!) but the impulse to call or answer CQ for random conversations seems to have evaporated. Presumably they are more busy on other bands or the computor.
I don’t want to re-ignite any tired old arguments about whether we should have done away with the Morse test, but I think it is no coincidence that the big decline in 2 metres in the UK followed the abolition of the B license. In my case I had enjoyed nearly forty years on V/UHF but was ready for a change, and suddenly I had ten new bands to play with! The B licensees were captive to V/UHF, this guaranteed activity was suddenly free to disperse, and once it started to disperse V/UHF started to become less attractive, and this reinforced the decline - a sort of feedback cycle!
Come to think of it, I had experienced something like this migration once before. Back in the first five years of the B license we were confined to 70cm and above, and 70cm became so active that it was drawing the A licensees away from 2 m and 2m became very quiet, but in 1968 the B’s were allowed to operate on 2m and 70cm activity collapsed almost immediately. Of course there was a practical reason for this: most rigs at the time were crystal controlled and used several stages of multiplication to reach 70 cm, it was a simple matter to remove the 70cm PA and convert the final tripler to a 2m PA, but then you no longer had 70cm capability, and since activity on 70cm had declined there was less inclination to build a separate dedicated transmitter for 70cm!
I guess that 2m will never return to its old status as a bread-and-butter band, but I doubt that it will get any worse than it is now.
yeah i agree. Its a good band and i do still use it for sota and SSB can be fun. it gets busy, well busier than silent, when some lift conditions are on. I know a few that were using 2m during the summer lift to talk to Holland, just across the sea from us.
Yes, it was - and is - a good DX band, but it was not handed to you on a plate, you had to wait for the big tropo openings, which only happened a few times a year, but at least by watching the weather map and the barometer you could see the build up and the opening when it arrived was no surprise. Not like sporadic E and aurora, which seemed to come out of nowhere and go just as fast. Over the years I worked over a dozen European countries besides the UK and Ireland and until about a decade ago I never ran more than 25 watts of SSB or had a bigger antenna than 8 elements.
I guess that 2m will never return to its old status as a bread-and-butter band, but I doubt that it will get any worse than it is now.
I think you are not aware how much 2m FM is used in some areas but I sometimes have great difficulty finding a free channel when on a higher hill - especially at a weekend. I am not only meaning the other SOTA activators who are active at the time (!) but regular nets and also individuals calling on 500 for their pals and then sitting on a frequency. It is not uncommon for me to be ensconced on, say 425, and then be swamped by locals who either can’t hear my 5 watts or assume that their ‘regular’ frequency is clear.
Obviously on a high hill like Pen y Fan (GW/SW-001) a week ago when there was a bit of a lift on then I will hear many conversations (and was bumped off 145.425) over quite a distance. I also had an enormous pile up and had to leave a lot of them behind when I QSYd to 70cm after 10 minutes as there was too little daylight (and it was too cold) to activate for longer than 20mins in total. I went to 70cm (my usual 433.475) where I gained another 8 contacts (inc Aberdulais, Cheltenham, Clovelly, Cheddar, Cardigan - please note this was 70cm!!) before I had to pull the plug again and start dismantling. My apoolgies to chasers on both bands for not being able to stay longer but I had checked from previous activations how long it was safe for me to stay if I was going to have a chance to activate the lower and more challenging in both the physical and radio sense, Fan Fawr (GW/SW-005).
Nearly 2½ hours later I was calling (30 mins earlier than I had predicted on the previous hill) with no alert or spot from Fan Fawr and qualified it within 5 mins including G0DEB from Bridlington on the East coast - a new contact for me - I did say there was a bit of a lift on but we didn’t make it on 70cm!! I was working on 145.375 again as 425, and many other frequences, were in use. On 70cm I didn’t get my Bridlington contact but I did reach MW1CFA near Holyhead Mt on the Isle of Anglesey (with a new mast so I think I shall be talking to him much more often) along with Cardigan, Cheddar and Shobdon. On this hill I took every contact I could and ended up with 11 on 2m (thanks for the S2S GW4OOE and MW0PYG on GW/NW-043) and 6 on 70cm which was very good for a slightly difficult hill.
Ok - these were high hills but we went up the local little Seager Hill (G/WB-022) just outside Hereford on a Friday in November and I ended up with 11 on 2m and 7 on 70cm with contacts ranging from Kidderminster to Stratford upon Avon - and a few SOTA: M1EYP on The Cloud (he seems nearly as keen as me on 70cm nowdays), GW4VPX on Wapley WB-016 and G4TQE on WB-015. On our recent GM/SS trip near Langholm in the Borders I managed to qualify all of the hills on 2m (with a lot of luck and by the skin of my teeth) and a few of them on 70cm so somebody must have been listening even up there (my grateful thanks to GM3VMB Peter in Eaglesfield).
Looking at my (radio) statistics I see I have talked to way over 3000 different call signs on 2m/70cm so there must be quite a few people still listening - unless they keep changing their call signs!!
73 Viki M6BWA
1 Like
That’s my experience too Viki. There’s plenty of life in VHF, in most parts of the country - including when conditions are flat.
A 2m activation I did last week netted 155 QSOs. Yes it was in IO83. Yes it did include a contest - but over 30 non-contest QSOs. Yes conditions were enhanced. But 155 though…
Its wonderful to hear these stories of activity and success, but when you are on a summit hearing numbers of stations, bear in mind that most of those stations cannot hear each other although they can hear you. Think of those far-off days when it was difficult if not impossible to find a clear channel at the home QTH, think how it must have sounded then from a summit!
I live in a conurbation, Birminham, the Black Country and Wolverhampton, Solihull, Coventry, at 1715 you used to hear all the mobiles going home, all the rag chewers, but I just ran through the FM channels and heard one QSO, too weak to copy. I have a 5el long yagi at 30 feet, my station isn’t contemptible. That is just the everyday low altitude reality. That is what I mean when I talk of low activity, from a summit you can hear several low activity areas around the horizon and when they are merged together for you, you can imagine that the band is active. Most of the time it isn’t. It isn’t dead, it just isn’t active. In flat conditions your FM horizon on a summit is a hundred miles or more, in the lowlands for an average station it is a fraction of that. A good reason to play SOTA, but in a tropo opening the DX is best after dark, and not many play SOTA after dark!
One thing that I must emphasise. It is a big mistake to take the activity that you can hear from a summit and extrapolate from that to say that the band is active. A SOTA summit is a priviledged place.
But … the context here is operating from a summit. This is a discussion forum about SOTA.
This is a discussion about the state of the two metre band, and the two metre band is important to us, being the third most used band for SOTA. 18.5% of all contacts, 1,035,431 of them according to the database, took place on two metres. I suspect that SOTA plays a significant part in maintaining the current activity level on 2m, and I think that for quite a few hams a 2m handy is their only SOTA capable rig, so 2m plays a significant part in maintaining SOTA activity. A discussion like this is important because it brings out the fact that 2m is no longer a sure fire source of contacts that we can take for granted, and steps like those listed earlier have to be taken to maximise the chances of a successful activation.
Something tells me this is going to rumble on endlessly, Brexit style, with no one persuaded to change their mind! I suspect I will continue to tour the UK qualifying activations with a 2m handheld, while you will continue to hear none of it in your shack
Well I remember working you on Walton Hill!
I rest my case.
Well, I’ll help this thread stagger on to 100…
The best way I’ve found to get replies to CQs when the band seems dead is to announce you are testing, either a microphone or some antennas.
“Hello test, this is mike 1… hello this is mike 2. Oh it doesn’t seem to be working… hang on, I’ll listen in another receiver… oh well, test concluded.”
Bang, here come the comments.
Mike 1 was much better than mike 2. Mike 2 is muffled. Mike 1 has better rounding. Mike 2 has better high frequency. Mike 2 was compressed.
All good fun.
I guess what it comes down to is having some “new content” in your CQ. And don’t call it a CQ…
1 Like
Another trick is to call “CQ 70cm” on 2 metres, they’ll queue up to tell you that you are on the wrong band! (And yes, I did it once!
)
The discussion so far has revolved around 2m and 70cm.
4m I keep being told is dead but there seem to be a surprising number of PMR sets out there just waiting to be used. Persistently call on 4m and you will be amazed ! Persistence is required because it takes a few calls for someone to identify where the noise is coming from in their shack then find the microphone. The chaser is usually delighted for a “rare” 4m QSO.
Currently I have activated 136 English summits on 4m, so it can’t be too dead.
73 de
Andrew G4VFL
1 Like
Nope… I think this is post 100 
1 Like