Monday 26 March 2018

13th March 2018. Pen y Garn SOTA Activation visit.

GW/MW-004. 13th Mar 2018.
Grid SN 798771, Altitude 611M.

Today's activation was my second trip to Pen y Garn in Mid Wales, this was going to be a chill out morning accompanied by a good friend of mine G0UFE (Simon). We set off from Telford at around
8 a.m. and headed towards Wales on the A5, we had decided on Welshpool, Newtown and via Llangurig. The journey took us 2 1/2 hours to reach the car park area at grid SN 80089 77686. This is the same spot that I parked last year and makes the walk to the summit an easy 20 minute walk.

Simon set up his mast, Yaesu FT-817 and a slinky, then started operating on 40M, I set up my mast, 20/40M HWEF and my homebrew 2M yagi. I started by having a quick check of the band and heard MW0KCB/P (Darious) on GW/MW-012 so went straight in with a S2S, a good start I thought then ended up with 3 out of my first 4 calls being S2S's.

After qualifying the summit I went onto 20M and my first contact was RW3XZ (Alexei) near Moscow, this kept on for another two hours, with contacts all over Europe.

The weather held out and was a great day out, plenty of contacts for us both and as a usual Telford Radio club outing we had a debrief on the way home at a nice public house in Welshpool.
Thank you Simon for accompanying me for the day.


Sunday 11 March 2018

10th March 2018. Great Orme SOTA Activation visit.

GW/NW-070. 10th Mar 2018.
Grid SH 767833, Altitude 207M.

My first SOTA Activation of the Great Orme, The journey through Llandudno was very busy with a few road works and I thought I was here in mid summer with so many tourists about.
I had heard that there was possible Pager break through so I opted on my Yaesu FT-817 just in case. I parked at the Summit car park and paid £1 for up to 2 hours parking.

Looking at the photo I think I forgot to shave this morning lol. The walk from the car park to the summit is only a few minutes, when I arrived I found out how windy the summit can be. I decided to set up slightly down the hill out of the wind as seen in the middle photo above.
I managed to only get 7 chasers logged but that was enough to finish the day off with another new unique summit bagged for me.

Maybe one day I will spend a lot more time there with HF and a vertical like (Mike) 2E0YYY. That is for another day in the future. 


10th March 2018. Tal Y Fan SOTA Activation visit.

GW/NW-040. 10th Mar 2018.
Grid SH 729726, Altitude 610M.

This weekends activation firstly took me to Tal Y Fan around 4.5 miles South West of Conwy North Wales. I had planned to leave home at 7 a.m. but I woke a little earlier than expected and left home at 6.40 a.m. This gave me a nice start to my route, most of the way it rained and I was thinking of all of the summit to summit activators that had planned to start at 6.30 a.m. ( glad I was in my car).

I parked up at Grid SH 73181 71478 and started my ascent at 8.52 a.m. It took me about 10 - 15 minutes longer than last year but my health and fitness levels have dropped a little.

The weather was not too bad, there was a lot of low cloud cover but at least the rain had stopped. Most of the snow had melted and the temperature was about 10 degrees when I left the car. The summit was a little windy so I set up on the seaward side of the wall near the summit. I started my CQ SOTA calls at 9.42 and was answered right away, this turned out to be a very nice activation with 18 chasers, 2D0FHG (Frank) & MDOIOM (Mike) both from Isle of Man and I think the furthest contact was G6ZET (Dave) in Bolton-le-Sands Lancashire some 75 miles.

I spent just under an hour and a half at the summit with setting up, operating and pack away, it didn't seam that long and this put me a little behind schedule for my next summit Great Orme. So I made my descent carefully as the cloud cover was starting to get bad and the ground was very wet from the melting snow. The descent took me nearly 30 minutes as I didn't want to end up with an injury. I did spend 5 minutes talking to two small groups of hill walkers as they were very interested in the poles sticking out of my rucksack. Public relations for SOTA & Amateur radio lol.