Weekend away camping in the North West with my wife and the radio hound. The campsite we were staying at only had 3 pitches and was lovely. It also turned out it was next to Hutton Roof Crags, both a SOTA and a POTA if you stood in the right place!
We had had a good day out at the beach at Arnside and got back to the campsite, I left the wife and dog at the campsite with beer and some nibbles and I picked up the radio bag and set off to try and active Hutton Roof Crags.
I had looked on google maps for somewhere to park and headed there. I parked up and started to walk in. I thought it would be quite straight forward but the path seemed to be heading round the hill rather then up so I thought I should just go in a straight line and head up. This was not my best idea.
The ground is a mixture of limestone pavement and thick dense prickly bushes and scrub. The amount of times I tripped and slipped was not funny, I had my phone in my hand to look at the map and make sure I was heading in the right direction and I was actually getting worried I might slip and get my leg caught in the one gaps in the limestone pavement and I would drop my phone and be really stuck with no one really knowing where I was. I put the phone away and followed a trail across the hill and then found a bigger one heading up. Phew was not going to get stuck on this hill.
Finally got to the activation zone for both POTA and SOTA, there was a gate and drystone wall so I attached the mast to the gate and got the antenna and radio set up.
20m to start and got one contact then nothing, this was not looking promising. I decided to 2M and put up the 2M antenna and made a few contacts including a summit to summit with Wales! Got enough on 2M to activate the summit
2M then dried up and I really wanted to activate the park to so switched back to HF and went to FT8, 2 more contacts there and the park was activated. Hurrah. Time to to pack up and get back to the campsite for the beer and cheese that was awaiting for me.
As the route up had been curved, this time I went straight down, a bit sketchy in places with some little climb downs the limestone but made it all in one piece
So lessons learned from this activation and none of them radio based, need to be a bit more careful in the future.
| Operation Details |
| Park: https://pota.app/#/park/GB-0021 Summit: https://www.sotadata.org.uk/en/summit/G/LD-052 Grid square: IO84pe WAB square: SD57 |
| Working Conditions |
| Icom IC-705 Icom AH-705 Sotabeams tactical mini Sotabeams EFLW Ham2K Polo |
| Operation Totals |
| 10 QSOs 5 DXCC Entities 1 S2S 3 Band and 3 modes 40m – 2 FT8 20m – 1 SSB 2m – 7 FM |
