SOTA European Tour 2019 Day 5

Day Five of my SOTA European Tour 2019

Day 5 was spent at the Friedrichshafen Rally, a good day and purchased a Sotabeams WolfWave I will cover this on another Blog.

Day 6 is 4 summits starting with:

DM/BW-228 Hummelsberg, (10 point summit 1002 M).
Latitude: 48.1178, Longitude: 8.7639

There is a car park here next to the airfield. The summit was just under 1 km walk, Michelle decided she was not up for walking so stayed in the car. Just before we started our drive up to the summit we saw a house with a very nice antenna/mast set up. I looked at Michelle and she said NO hi hi.

It had been raining during the night and the grass was still very wet as I found out just before I managed to get to the summit. I wish I had put my Gor tex boots on but I didn't so ended up with wet feet.
I set up the linked dipole and saw that DL/ON7DQ/P (Luc) had spotted himself on DM/BW-086 so I went straight to his frequency on 40M and had a S2S. I then turned my antenna into 20M's spotted myself and started calling CQ SOTA. My first QSO was with G7LMF (Graham) from TDARS my local club then followed by 11 further QSO's all on 20M.
This is a nice summit with great views of the surrounding country side.

Our next summit for the day was

DM/BW-041 Wandbühl. (10 point summit 1007 M).
Latitude: 48.1628, Longitude: 8.8053

This is another summit with a small walk of about 1 km, we left the car at 48.167990  8.804175 near a barn type building with a picnic bench outside. We started the small walk through the forest tracks for about 700 meters. As we approached the summit we saw there was a dipole already erected and three operators also operating the summit for SOTA. These were PA0INA (Frans), PA3EIV (Andre) and PA5KM (Coen). We all had a nice chat for about 15 minutes whilst they finished their activation then I set up my dipole on 20M, spotted myself and started calling CQ SOTA.

My first QSO was with MW0JZH/P (John) another TDARS member, he was on holiday in Wales. Followed by a further 11 QSO's, another nice summit to activate.

Our next summit was a very picturesque view even from a distance.

DM/BW-846 Burg Hohenzollern. (10 point summit 850 M).
Latitude: 48.3236, Longitude: 8.9675

This summit can be seen from many miles away, as there is a beautiful castle on top. We parked up in the car park I think it was €5. Michelle said I am not walking up and back again. I managed to persuade here to shuttle bus up and walk back hi hi. The shuttle was €2 for one way. We liked what we saw of the castle so decided to pay the entrance fee of  €12 and had a good look around.

The dipole was set up and I started on 40M but only managed two QSO's so I tried my luck on 20M and managed 6 further QSO's. Thank you for the chasers that managed to get through. The castle was closing as we started and lucky it was not a busy day. We had about 15 people pass us on their way down. We packed away and started our descent back to the car park which took us about 10 minutes.
Time to head for our final summit of the day.

DM/BW-058 Burg. (10 point summit 975 M).
Latitude: 48.2719, Longitude: 9.0219

This was another drive up into the forest summit. Lucky it was a tarmac road, as we approached the top there was the locked gates and camera's as pointed out by G4OBK (Phil) on his Blog. We parked about 200 meters from the gates, they were out of sight so I headed into the woods and Michelle stayed in the car.
As it was now getting late in the day the flying insects were becoming a pain so I had to reapply my insect repellent. Again no signal on my phone O2 so I used Michelle's on EE, this was the case on about 60% of the summits that we completed over the tour.

The dipole was set to 40M and I managed to get 6 QSO's, This was the worst summit to pack away my dipole, it took me three times longer than usual as the wires got tangled up on every branch that it came in contact with.
I was also getting bitten to death even with the spray so I made a hasty retreat. It was getting late in the day so I told Michelle I would treat her to some food on the way back to our hotel. It was going to be too late for food at the hotel so as the big spender that I am .

Well we both enjoyed it hi hi.