Hello all,
Been having an issue with the foot so decided to go do a SOTA that had a shorter hike for the activation. I left early from the QTH with a goal of catching the sunrise from the summit. Unfortunately Google Maps had other plans for me and after a major redirection, I got to the summit about an hour after sunrise. Not the plan but so it goes.
After a short hike up from parking and some minimal pushing through scrub, I was at the summit and got to spotting myself. Unfortunately I spotted the wrong peak but was able to make four contacts on 2m with my yagi. The longest contact on 2m was around 100km with a 59 signal report. I am using an FT-70D with an Arrow Antenna Yagi. I only run the 2m elements when doing a peak and have a spot to swap to the carbon fiber boom when my ticket comes up. A couple of my contacts were hams near my QTH and knew to be listening for me. I did notice that the radar facility at the top will interfere with 2m operations. It almost sounds like they just stopped keying the mic.
View from the summit:
It was pretty cold and windy at the top and after the four contacts on two meters I decided to switch to HF and figure out how I was going to get everything set up in the wind. Luckily it went pretty smoothly and this was my first activation where I just used some scrub to hold my mast vs staking it out.
I didn’t take any pictures of my HF set up but I am using an x6100 and a Micro PA-50 amplifier for 40 watts out to the antenna. For coax I have RG-58 from the amp to my antenna and some RG-174 from the radio to the amp. The antenna is a linked dipole with 40m, 20m, and 10m links made by N9SAB. As you can see in the photo above, I am using a carbon fiber carp rod for a mast. For the software side, I am using the in development FT8CN app and my android phone and I find it to be very intuitive and saves me from bringing my widows tablet into the field. I will try to get a picture in the future.
For power I am using a 9000 mAh (9 Ah) three cell lipo for the amp and the internal battery for the radio. This was my first run with this setup and I was very curious how long the batteries would last. For the internal battery, it started at 8.2v and by the time I stopped (one hour of operation) it was at 7.3v. I was running the radio at 5w output for the 40 watts out of the amp. The 9000 mAh lipo dropped to a steady 11.9v output and when I got home I put back 2200 mA for a return to full charge. Past experience tells me that the battery was 35% used.
During the hour of operation, I got 20 contacts on 20m mostly in the US but was able to get one contact from Malaysia. I don’t have very many DX contacts so that was awesome to see them come back to me. I did weigh my radio gear and with everything above I am sitting at 7.7 lbs (3.5 kg) with a 6.5 watt/lb ratio.
I was going to try 2m again and maybe 10m but after an hour of being wind blown and the heat from my body leaving my rear into the earth I decided it was time to return the the family and pack everything up. Here is my pack with everything loaded, a small PSK, FAK, and some water:
Thank you for reading this far and one last picture of me at the end:
Until the next one,
Robert, 73