Well I gave it my best shot.
I got up at 3.30am (0230utc), made a coffee and slipped out of the house (via my shack for a vital patch lead I’d forgotten to pack) and drove to the parking space just beyond the Old Hill Inn, Chapel-le-Dale. I was parked up by 4.15am (0315utc), it was very dark.
I finished my coffee and then headed off across the road, using the maximum brightness mode on my head torch.
It was fun walking up Ingleborough in the pitch black, I descended in darkness last month, but this was my first dark ascent.
I reached the summit without difficulty just before 6am (0500utc). The weather was good for October, there was some mist but I had managed the ascent perfectly fine in just my fleece jumper. Upon reaching the summit, I didn’t waste any time in putting on my down vest and Gore Tex jacket, I didn’t want to waste the heat that I’d built up!
Assembling the antennas took some time as I had taken a home brew vertical for 20m, a VP2E antenna and a SOTAbeams 3 band linked dipole. I erected all three antennas and had them all connected for instant switching.
I started off on 40m CW but I just couldn’t hold down a frequency and I didn’t get any responses. I heard the VP6R dxpedition CQing a few times, I’m guess they were testing.
I then spent the rest of my time on 20m CW except for one SSB S2S. I found it slow going at times on 20m, there were sporadic bursts of activity, I’m guessing I was spotted as WWFF station as I had a crazy sounding pile up at one point and the chasers were sending ‘44’ back at me.
I heard some snippets from some JA stations but unfortunately the signals were nowhere near good enough to support a QSO.
Despite the disappointing results on the radio, I had a good time and for once I actually managed to operate the keyer on my FT817 (maybe it was the practice on the FTdx101D last weekend?).
For Ed - I found that the VP2E wasn’t as noisy on receive but signals were about as loud as on the vertical. I ended up using the vertical for most of the time.
I spent the last part of my activation calling VP6R on 40m. The incoming signal was peaking S9 on 7.023MHz but despite many calls I couldn’t bust through.
73,
Colin