SOTA European Tour 2019 Day 7

Today's activation's were going to be our last in Germany, then we would be heading towards Luxembourg. These summits are close to the German - France boarder.

Our first summit was:

DM/BW-054, Hohloh. (10 point summit 984 M).

Latitude: 48.7086, Longitude: 8.4158

We parked at 48.713685,8.42438, this is a large drive around triangle shaped car park with lots of room for well over 200 cars. There were 3 cars including ours, so not too many people walking the summit. The weather was very hot so minimum gear, hats and lots of water to take as the walk is about 30 minutes with a slight to moderately steep incline.

During our little tour we saw a lot of the sign above. Umleitung German for diversion and they mean it, the German's block the road and you can take 20 - 30 minutes diversions which we had to on a few occasions.
This summit was a nice walk even in the hot sun, the main problem I had was no mobile phone signal on either my O2 or Michelle's EE network. I managed to get a S2S with S50AAA/P the Slovenia SOTA Club. I managed to save the day when I called break on the WAB Worked All Britain net on 40M. M0NMI (David) heard me calling and I managed two more QSO's. (Thank you WAB).

Our second summit of the day was going to be a highlight for me as I was going to be the 23rd only activation.

DM/BW-103, Merkur. (6 point summit 668 M).
Latitude: 48.7644, Longitude: 8.2806

The only way to this summit as far as I could see was via the cable railway, this was a carriage type system that held up to 16 passenger's in each car there was one at the top of the hill and one at the bottom.

We had a little walk around to admire the views then I set up my dipole, I started on 40m and my first QSO was with G4OBK (Phil) followed by a further 10 QSO's. I have now added up all of the chasers that followed me during the tour and the top place was joint with G4OBK (Phil) and G4WSB (Bill) both on 12 summits chased. Thank you guys, followed closely by EA2DT (Manuel) with 11 summits chased.

Time for our final German summit.

DM/BW-019, Hornisgrinde. (10 point summit 1163 M).
Latitude: 48.6058, Longitude: 8.2014

This was another drive on summit, as long as the barrier at the bottom is open so I was told when I asked at the shop at the bottom.
We parked up in the car park and walked around 100 M to the bench that I chose as the activation point. I quickly set up the dipole and managed 9 QSO's between 40M & 20M including a S2S with EA2BD/P (Ignacio) on EA2/NV-138.

After just a little over 25 minutes of operating we decided to call it a day as it was almost 18:30 p.m. local time and we still had to drive to our hotel for our last night in Germany and we had both decided on a German Gyros for food as we had not had one on this trip at all.

It went down very nicely followed by a glass of orange Fanta. It had been at least a year since our last one.

We stayed in a holiday inn for our last hotel near Ringsheim and it was probably the best nights sleep we had had.