Sorry you’re suffering from Tom’s poor WX 
It’s a bummer when you travel for a SOTApedtion and the WX is sub-optimal. Poor old Tim is out in Letterewe Forrest and I was hoping for some killer photos. Maybe next time.
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For weeks? Wow! I have over sixty years experience of driving to GM for hill walking and climbing, sometimes several times a year (and starting in pre-motorway days!) and in that time I can only remember three full weeks of fine weather. OTOH I can remember several weeks of non-stop rain and wind when all we could do was splash around on low-level plods! At least the pubs were tolerable. To survive GM WX you need a sense of humour!
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In the 80’s and 90’s I lived for 16 years in the Central Belt. I often wore a heavy-duty, thigh-length, lined, waxed-cotton jacket with a hood – with inner and outer pockets big enough for rabbits - which was very effective at keeping off the wind-driven horizontal heavy rain hitting your head hard like old-fashioned stair carpet rods. I haven’t worn it since I moved south of the border 25 years ago. Boots or wellingtons were a must even on local country walks.
Having said that I recall some lovely long dry warm/hot sunny days you can get in June in GM.
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May can be pretty good, too, but I remember a week of warm sunny weather in March one year, when we gave the iced-up gullies of Glencoe a good bashing! You can never tell…
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My handsfree setup for the car, although sounding a little complicated, was very easy to use. An electret microphone positioned at the side of the sun visor, a single momentary switch fastened to the side of the gear-stick and a red led positioned near the instrument panel. These were all connected to a small control box which housed an Arduino and some switching, which in turn connected to the rigs microphone jack. One push of the gear lever mounted switch put the rig into TX and energised the dashboard led, then another press sent it back into receive. The Arduino was programmed to give a short TX timeout with the led flashing 5 seconds before the end. With the light flashing, another push of the switch reset the TX timeout.
None of this answers why there is such low /M activity these days, mobile phones, modern cars, too many modes, who knows.
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This is very rare. Almost without exception I bring fine wx with me to GM. TBF, this is my third GM trip of 2025, and both the previous two have enjoyed remarkably good weather. We’ve only arrived and checked in 30 minutes ago; I’m confident that once Scotland realises I have arrived it will buck its ideas up - it usually does.
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I remember back in the late 50’s when I had just discovered ham radio, the band of choice for /M was 160m, 10 watts of AM to huge bumper-mounted antennas with chunky great coils. A rally in those days was a mobile rally and it was an achievement to get a station in a car and make contacts. A decade later the favoured band became 2m, usually with about 10 watts of AM to a halo, and many of the set-ups were home-brew. Again there was a feeling of achievement involved. Later commercial rigs became plentiful but now there was the excitement of new technology as repeaters started to appear. I wonder if the reduction of activity is partly because the mobile scene has all become a little passe, engine noise apart (and some of those 60’s cars could be heard coming 500m away if the spark suppression had failed!) perhaps it is all too easy, nothing new and exciting about it, you spend some money and that’s it, job done! Modern traffic is brutal, you need to concentrate, no time for old-fashioned nattering on a rig!
I hope that continues for you, Tom, but in my experience you have been remarkably fortunate - though, TBF, my experience is mostly in the Western Highlands, which are bad weather magnets! My first trip north of the Highland Boundary Fault was in August, it was a complete wash-out and the midges were voraceous. It took me several years to encounter a week of decent weather.
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I wonder how many people take this into consideration ? I run a max of 10 watt mobile ( normally 5 ) as that way with my basic 1/4 wave I’m within the limits and a max of 10 watts at home ( normally 1 watt) because the nature of my home means if I run anymore ( I could push it to 15 as I’m using rubbish coax and only a home brew dipole) If I were to use a high gain antenna or higher power I would have to erect a mast directly in the middle of the garden at height to make it compliant. MRs M0PAB would object and I wouldn’t really want it anyway.
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That leads me on to my theory, which often gets shot down in flames. Amateur radio has for many become a consumer hobby, buy the boxes, buy the leads, buy the aerial, marvel at all the technology and then what, discuss all the wonderful rig menus? I’m not suggesting that we all need to start homebrewing to save the hobby, but we need more of a common interest than buying a black box. Calling cq might well end up with you talking to a total stranger, easy when you have something in common, eg AM, homebrew, old military radios, Sota, …
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There’s always been a large number of CBers (cheque-book-ers) in the hobby. People who buy everything and never make anything. That doesn’t make them bad hams however. They’re just missing out on the fun of actually building stuff. More fun is building stuff that does a job where the only cost is your time as it’s made from the lifetime collection of assorted electrical tat some of us have built up.
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There’s no doubt most people got more disposable income decade on decade than when I first got into amateur radio in the 1960s and - since then - a hell of a lot more ‘black box’ radios for amateurs became available and affordable. Back then we had little choice but to build our own or modify ex-mil / ex-commercial radios.
A lot of busy working people with families don’t have the time (or expertise) to build equipment and then operate it, so they choose only to operate with their limited spare time.
I suspect the vast majority of SOTA ops don’t have the expertise to design or build a modern sophisticated amateur transceiver except from a kit perhaps. Which means folk like me are limited to making antennas and cables.
I reckon (from reading AR mags, blogs, etc) that amateur radio is still a very wide church with a lot of very impressive construction work and experimentation (e.g. solar-powered APRS digipeaters). I’m not interested in AM, homebrew, or old military radios, but ahem, some of my best friends are - really.
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And surely that’s one of its strengths. There is something for everyone and no compulsion to do everything.
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I’ve made a 2m Flowerpot tonight. It was all tickety-boo and so I made it all pretty and rugged which included some rather jolly heat-shrink over the choke. Oh it looked a sexy beast and was all symmetrical and “professional”. Should have known… knocked the match to hell in a hand-cart. Large amounts of the heatshrink over the windings has now been removed and the match is back to more than acceptable.
Maybe when Tom’s pishy Sassenach WX ( 
) has blown through and things dry out a bit, I can give a test and compare it with my J-Pole.
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…and tuners!
Bear with me, I want to make a point but approach it slowly!
I got my “B” licence in 1964, in that first year the lowest frequency band available to us was 70cm, and previous to that all my construction was HF band stuff. I had gradually worked my way up to a six band double conversion superhet, not so much designed as mixed and matched from various designs in “Cam’s Comic” (Practical Wireless). Suddenly I was faced with a new world, I had to build a 70cm converter, a 2m exciter and a 70cm tripler/amplifier using tuned circuits that were just lumps of metal. It was a new world so it is little wonder that it took me six months to get on the air! There was no chance of cheque booking, Tom Withers brought out his 5watt tripler/amplifier a year or so later, military commercial gear was like hens teeth! Later I went high power (!) with a 30 watt PA and later again a 60 watt PA. It wasn’t so much a rig as an array: receiver, PSU, 2m exciter, 70cm tripler/amplifier and a modulater filled a table two metres long! When in 1968 we were allowed to use 2m everything got compacted, but even then the idea of portable operation was pure fantasy!
Now my point, these rigs, the various receivers that I had built, were all hollow state (well, there were diodes, and after a year or so a pre-amp using a TV transistor as the prices fell.) It was nothing like the plethora of minature kits available now, there was acres of space for the ham-handed (me) to wave a soldering iron in. I don’t think I ever designed anything from first principles, it was a matter of browsing magazines and taking a circuit here, another there, and so on, combining them and getting them to work together - just as Andy says, but writ large! Basically when I started out we were not highly technical, we were a generation of artful bodgers, building not from the love of construction but from sheer necessity. Believe me, when the Liner-2 and the FT290R1 came along at an affordable price it was a huge relief! 
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A fine bit of “whataboutism”
There’s plenty of RF engineers who would have difficulty doing that. That’s not the real issue as even 70 years ago there were few bleeding edge designers in ham radio. But the skills learned should be greater than knowing which end of a soldering iron gets hot. I feel that people should have some basic skills. They should be able to fit RF connectors properly, they should be able to make up patch leads, interconnects for their radios and ancillaries (mini-jack, miniDIN, DIN, phono, microphone plugs), they should be able to make power cables with the correct size of cable and fusing, they should know the mains supply earth wiring in the home so they don’t get bitten by PME (maybe UK only) etc., they should be able to select the correct type of coax cable for each application, they should be able to know why cheap Chinese BNCs can be OK and when you need to buy Suhner or Radiall etc., they should know how to tell quality coax from cheap and useless stuff. They should be able to read an antenna spec and know if it’s believable or lies. They should know how to pick a shack PSU not just by the price. They should have some ability to trace noise sources in their home and how to reduce radiated noise emissions from domestic electrical equipment.
They don’t need to know how to write SMP micro-kernel OS services or how to specify which ADC to use in an SDR HF receiver or how to design a 1kW LDMOS or GAN PA. They probably don’t need to know how to dip and load a PA any more (can’t remember when I last needed to do it and haven’t done it too many times.)
And possibly the most important in today’s shack…how to run digital modes without splattering all over the band!
None of what I believe people should know are particularly difficult topics for people with an interest in amateur radio to acquire. And they can be acquired for not much money and just a little bit of their time. Oh, and by joining a club and being “elmered” into how to do such items. So they can do their bit “elmering” others.
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No, it isn’t whataboutism.
Your micro-quote is a classic bit of out-of-context-ism.
[Definition: whataboutism: technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue.]
I was responding to the statement “Amateur radio has for many become a consumer hobby, buy the boxes, buy the leads, buy the aerial, marvel at all the technology and then what, discuss all the wonderful rig menus?”
My point was, the vast majority of us are content to buy the black boxes and couldn’t make an equivalent even if we wanted to. In fact, many of us [including you and me] become very fond of our own choices of black box, frequently promoting their attributes.
“we need more of a common interest than buying a black box.”
And I wanted to counter the implication that we black-box owners don’t have common interest in many other aspects of amateur radio. Take me for example, if you surveyed my posts on this reflector, they cover a huge range of AR topics other than commercially-made rigs.
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