9th March 2019. SOTA Activation GW/MW-007 & 008.

Today's SOTA Activation's.

GW/MW-007. 9th March 2019.

Altitude 560 M. Grid SN 775898.

This was going to be my first shared activation. I was joined by GW4VPX (Allan), one of the few Mountain Goats in the SOTA community. I have met Allan two or three times now at the
  TDARS Hamfest.
 and have spoken with him on the air as a chaser and even many summit to summit contacts.
I left my home QTH (Telford) at 05:50 a.m. and headed towards Aberystwth. This was a 2 hours and 15 minutes journey to eventually park at Grid SN 7363 8868 this was our agreed meeting point.

We had decided to make this a linear route and left my car at this location. We then used Allan's car to make our way to Grid SN 7749 8796. We eventually started our 5 mile walk at 08:38 a.m. and headed towards I think the hardest 2 point SOTA summit I ever completed. We managed to arrive at the summit of Banc Llechwedd-mawr at 09:48 a.m. This was a walk of about 1.85 miles or 2.98 Km's.

We arrived to I think probably the strongest wind I have ever had during a summit activation. We tried 2M FM with just one radio set up and after calling CQ SOTA for about 15 minutes we had only managed to hold one QSO with GW0PLP (Don). Allan said time to try HF, I looked at him a little strange and then looked at how strong the wind was and he said NO PROBLEMS lol we will only put the mast up a few meters. As seen from the picture above the linked dipole was only about 2.5 meters from the centre feed point to the ground and the ends were literally a foot off the ground. We went onto 60M a band that I dont have an antenna for but Allan uses this a lot. We had a QSO with CT2IWW (Paulo) and that was all we managed.

Allan said 60M as never been so poor so we added the coils to his dipole and went to 80M, with a press of the tune button on his KX2 we had 1-1 swr and started calling CQ. We managed 6 QSO's including G3UKV (Martyn) and G7LMF (Graham) from my own club TDARS. I was amazed and learnt a good lesson thank you Allan.

We packed up and started our journey towards our next summit.

Today's second SOTA Activation.

GW/MW-008. 9th March 2019.

Altitude 550 M. Grid SN 759878.

This was another one hour and 30 minutes of walking but we did have a 10 minute break for a bite and drink near the second bridge at Grid SN 766888. From this bridge it was a about 55 minutes to reach the summit.

The wind was even stronger at this summit than it was on GW/MW-007 and a mast and a dipole at even 2.5M was going to get destroyed so we persevered with my 2M Yagi and eventually managed to log five QSO's. Allan managed to hold a S2S to the Lake District but conditions didn't hold up so not for me but never mind.
After only 30 minutes on the summit we had a quick coffee and started our decent before we got blown off the summit. This time we were heading west towards the location I have left my car some five hours earlier. The way down was boggy in some areas but not too bad. It looks like you can take a short cut straight across and join the road but don't it is well too boggy, just head towards the small group of trees at Grid SN 7529 8867 and go counter clockwise around them through the old farm yard. Then rejoin the road and follow it all the way to the park car location.

I found a new App on the SOTA Reflector this week so I tried it out as seen above (Relive).
Thank you to all of the chasers and a special thank you to GW4VPX (Allan) for a great day out.