This last weekend a buddy and I activated Bennett Peak (W6/NC-305). We hit the trailhead at dawn as he has some childcare obligations in the afternoon and I was hoping to hit a POTA after the activation of the peak. We have had some decent rains here and decided that we would go with 2m as we didn’t know how if we would get rain on the activation. Additionally, the peak is covered in poison oak and setting up an antenna seemed like it would be a challenging task. The summit on the hike up:
The rout we took was 7.03 miles (11.3 km) round trip, with a couple thousand feet (610 m) of elevation gain. Total time including activation was 3 hours 45 minutes.
My buddy was using an FT-60 with a MFJ long ranger and I was using a FT-70D with an arrow yagi. I had a few local HAMs waiting for us to summit and while I was setting up my antenna my buddy made two contacts with them. I hopped on and made the same two contacts and connected with a third. At that point my buddies battery died and although he thought he had a second battery, we ended up sharing my radio for the rest of the activation.
Our farthest contact was a S2S with K6EL in San Francisco:
The contact that looked longer was actually local operating mobile. With eight contacts we decided to call it and pack up to head down the hill. First I had a summit breakfast:
I took a picture of my buddy with the yagi making a contact and played around with it and made him into a comic book character:
As always we had a blast on the hike up the hill and making contact with folks in the North Bay. Looking forward to the next one and thank you for reading.
Robert 73