Sunday 25 February 2018

24th February 2018. Brown Clee Hill SOTA Activation visit.

G/WB-002. 24th Feb 2018.
Grid SO 593867, Altitude 540M.

I had decided to try and tackle two summits today as I feel my strength is returning. I still need to take it easy as I am not at my former fitness and health levels. To start with we left home 08:15 a.m from Telford. M6SZF (Jamie) my son was along for company and to keep an eye on me as usual, we arrived at grid SO 58546 86895. 08:43 a.m. which I think was good going. It took us 2 or 3 minutes to put on our walking boots and get our gear. We managed to climb the steep section in about 25 minutes with a few rest breaks.
We arrived at the summit at 09:20 a.m. so 37 minutes ascent wasn't too bad, then I had to try and find somewhere out of the very cold bitter wind. The only place was north west of the summit, the only problem was we were very close to the masts, I knew this was going to cause us a few problems and it did. Most people were giving me good 5/9 signal reports but I struggled to hear most people due to the noise levels from the local masts.

I had to try at the summit to get a contact with M1EYP/P (Tom) when he was S2S on G/SP-013 as the noise level was just too much. It worked so that was the main thing. It was a good overall activation with 12 contacts including Tom twice, once in his car and then again when he was portable.
Jamie wanted to test the ice (literally) at the end as seen below, the ice was 2 inch (50mm) thick at the outer edge but Jamie was not going to try any further out.

9:55 a.m. Activation complete and equipment packed up, time to head our way down and to see how I felt once we arrived back at the car. We arrived back at 10:11 a.m. and we were both feeling good so decided to head towards Titterstone Clee to activate G/WB-004.



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