Wasn’t the weather absolutely glorious last weekend?
After supporting the Yorkshire Three Peaks Fell Race with RAYNET on Saturday 25th April, I camped overnight in Horton-in-Ribblesdale with the rest of the team. By 5:30pm, having earned myself the free meal (vegetable chilli), I decided that sitting still wasn’t really an option… so off I went for a “quick” 11-mile round trip up Fountains Fell, G/NP-017, and back. Just under 3.5 hours later, I rolled back into camp at around 10pm feeling very pleased with myself.
The next morning, after almost freezing to death overnight, I packed up quickly and set off for summit 1 of 3… Dodd Fell Hill, G/NP-016.
Waze tried its absolute best to send me up a non-permissible road (cheers for that), but I eventually made it round the other side and parked up just before 9am. I left the car at a gate I wasn’t entirely convinced I should open, and started walking up what can only be described as a very long road.
A car appeared behind me, which was mildly annoying considering I probably could’ve driven this bit myself. I stepped to the side to let it pass, expecting it to disappear into the distance like any normal car would…
…except it didn’t 
About 20 metres ahead, it suddenly slammed on the brakes.
Now, at this point I’m thinking I’ve either done something wrong, or I’m about to have a very awkward conversation 
The door swings open, and out steps… Jake, M0PVC.
“What are YOU doing here?!” 
Completely unplanned, around two hours from both of our home QTHs, and somehow we’d managed to pick the exact same summit at almost the exact same time. I knew SOTA was a small world, but this felt ridiculous even by those standards.
Jake kindly gave me a lift the rest of the way to the start, where we passed some rather serious-looking setups supporting comms for the Fellsman race. They didn’t seem too interested in what we were about to get up to… clearly far too professional to appreciate the chaos of two blokes about to call CQ SOTA.
We set off chatting nonsense as usual, and before long we were on the summit. The Slim-G went up, and our first contact was a S2S with Luke, @M9WRD, on Pen-y-Ghent. First time working Luke, and it felt pretty cool that the three of us (all seemingly in our mid-20s!) were working S2S at the same time. Definitely not something you hear every day in this hobby. As always, our trusty top chasers G7SXR and G6AEK were in the log shortly after.
Now, you might be thinking this all sounds fairly standard…but we decided to try something a bit different. Because clearly, speaking to someone over RF just isn’t enough - we decided to send selfies as well.
Slow Scan Television (SSTV)… ON THE SUMMIT 
Using just our mobiles and handhelds, we sent SSTV images on 432.500 MHz (sticking within the band plan, of course!). The results are below:
Not bad for sending pictures over RF from the middle of nowhere, right? 
Unsurprisingly, 70cm wasn’t exactly alive with SSTV activity, so we didn’t manage any further contacts - but honestly, just getting that to work at all from a summit felt like a win.
After having far too much fun, we decided to skip HF on this one and head over to Buckden. From there, I set off for Birks Fell, G/NP-031, while Jake took on Buckden Pike. We stayed in contact the whole time on 70cm, using our FT-4Xs on low power (0.5W), still managing solid 59++ signals throughout. We were both slightly disappointed there wasn’t an even lower power setting to experiment with!
Birks Fell delivered nicely, including 60 ITL - I can’t complain at all.
So, what’s next?
Well, the Lakes this weekend, and Mickle Fell, the mighty G/NP-002, at the end of May… it never really stops, does it? I’ve definitely still got the SOTA bug… incurable 
Hopefully catch many of you on the bands soon, S2S or otherwise 
73 for now,
Tom – M1TJM
