5th January 2019. SOTA Activation of GW/MW-001.

GW/MW-001 Plynlimon-Pen Pumlumon Fawr. 5th January 2019.

Altitude 752M. Grid SN 789869.

Today was time for a new unique summit. I had decided to visit Plynlimon-Pen in Mid Wales. I left home at 05:50 a.m. and as usual of late headed towards Shrewsbury on the A5. I was supposed to turn left on to the A458 towards Welshpool, I was on my 2M rig talking away with G0OHY (Arthur) and then realised I was nearly in Oswestry. A little detour that added about 10 - 15 minutes on to my journey, lesson learnt follow the SatNav.

I eventually arrived at the car park Grid SN 79793 84071. Which is the one that GW4VPX (Allan) used just before Christmas. Yes it is still £5, my first time here so I didn't know which Bungalow I was to pay and it was 07:50 a.m. and everywhere was in darkness, so I left a note on my windscreen saying I will pay on my return. Which I did, in the light I could see the honesty box, so left my money there.

I made my ascent up the green route and because of the cloud cover made my descent down the red route so I could follow the fence line. My ascent took me exactly one hour with only two or three small stops for photos, this was maybe a little too fast as I was a little out of breath once I arrived at the summit.
The summit was covered with cloud and ice patch's here and there. I decided to set up my 6m mast attached to the trig point with bungees and my guy ropes. I set up the Sotabeams linked dipole (40/30/20 M) and my homebrew 2 M yagi.
I then realised there was no 3G or 4G so I could not spot myself. I started calling CQ Sota on 30M and was answered after about 3 or 4 attempts by SA4BLM (Lars) in Sweden, followed by IK2LEY  (Fabio) in Italy. At this time a couple of other stations started to use the frequency and this made my activation very hard as they where both 599 to me and I then struggled to make my next contact which was DJ2MX (Mario). All I can say is really sorry it took so long Mario but every time you tried the other two stations were over powering. My Morse is still a little weak for a pile up really sorry.

The map below shows my CW and 2M SSB DX contacts.
The activation was going slow until a friend of mine G0OOQ (Sean) informed me there was a lift of 2M. So I turned my homebrew 2M yagi horizontal and tuned around the 144 Mhz on USB. To my surprise the first person logged was F1RAF (Nicolas) followed by a further 3 more France stations, 1 Spain, 1 Ireland and 1 Scotland.

I managed to log 4 S2S's with MW0XOT/P (John GW/MW-004), MW0XRT/P (David GW/NW-046), GW4TJC/P (Simon GW/NW-019) and MW0ZAQ/P (Chas GW/NW-053). Thank you to all of the activators and chasers for making it a good day.
After three hours I was starting to get cold so I pulled the plug at 12:15 p.m. packed up and started my descent, as stated above the cloud cover was getting worse I decided to follow the fence line down this took about 55 minutes.