3rd June 2017. GW/NW-035 SOTA Activation visit.

GW/NW-035 3rd June 2017.

Grid SH 724447. Altitude 661M.

This weekends SOTA Summit was Manod Mawr near the village of Ffestiniog North Wales. We left our home location of Telford at 08:12 a.m. and arrived at our car park location at grid SH 73269 45601 around 10:35 a.m. We collected our equipment and started our ascent, the walk up took around 30 minutes and was not too hard.

We arrived at the summit and decided where to set up our little camp as it was very windy. We settled on two larger stones that were just a short distance from stone ring as the stone ring was full of nettles. I set up my 2M dipole and Jamie set up his cooker and frying pan. I had a little flick around the band and found it very very quiet, I started my QSO's with MW0KCB/P (Darius) he was working on his third Hump I believe he said of the morning. He also informed me that he had struggled with the band.

I managed to log 5 QSO's and tried very hard to add 2E0LKC (Peter) with the aid of a good friend M0CQE (Paul), as seen in the centre photo above Jamie tried to raise the antenna height a few more feet, this improved my transmission to Paul from 4/4 to 5/5 but Peter with his new antenna still could not hear me. Sorry Peter we tried but we only have 5 watts. Overall this is a very nice summit with amazing views of the surrounding  hills and valleys.

We decided to call it a day at around 12:10 a.m. as it did not look like we were going to get any more contacts, so we packed up and headed back to the car. The way back seamed steeper than when we came and took us the same 30 minutes to get back to the car as it took to arrive at the summit. Once back as the car boots off and a steady drive of 2 1/2 hours back home, until next weeks summit I hope you all enjoy the info and hope it helps you with your activation of this summit.
73's from me and Jamie.