Sitting at home I decided as it was such a nice day that I will go out and try and activate a SOTA or a POTA.
I decided I’m going to do rumbled more or also known as Ilkley Moor so I got all my kit together and set off once I was getting close to Ilkley Moor I saw there were a lot of cars parked up and realised I would not be able to get parked at the main car park I found somewhere along the side of the road and pulled over sorted the kit out and set off up the hill
It was a lovely walk up towards the summit but as I’m out of shape I was huffing and puffing a bit. Once I got to the summit, I got the mast set up and set up the end fed long wire.
Before I manged to get on the radio, I was asked what I was doing by a group of young people, I explained, and they said that was cool. They then pointed off into the distance and said “do you know what those white things are?” They were pointing at Menwith Hill, the US signals intelligence base run by the NSA. Told them it’s a US spy base and they said, “are you going to try and listen in?” “No, I’m not” I replied. And off they went on their walk.
Time to get the radio on, I decided to start by hunting and found a SOTA operator and managed to hunt them, turned out there were 2 operators on that summit. Then found my good friend G5LSI on another summit and hunted him. Could not find any more SOTA operators so then hunted POTA operators and got 4 in the log. Now it was time to call CQ. Got a few more in the log with enough to activate the park.
I had brought my kite (Prism Bora 7) with me in case the weather was going to be in my favour, and it was just. I dropped the mast and removed the antenna from it and set up the kite and it lifted beautifully. Time for some kite QSO’s.
As always with kite operations your signal is very dependent on the kite and if its up or not. This time out the kite did not drop but a few times it did dip and it was noticeable with the signal reports I got.
Got packed up after getting 23 in the log. Walked back down to the car but this time to a different route to find a steam and test my new Grayl water filter bottle. Found a stream and filled the bottle up and cleaned the water. It tasted great!
| Operation Details |
| Park: https://pota.app/#/park/GB-4915 Summit: https://www.sotadata.org.uk/en/summit/G/NP-028 Grid square: IO93cv WAB square: SE14 |
| Working Conditions |
| Icom IC-705 Icom AH-705 Sotabeams tactical mini Prism Bora 7 Sotabeams EFLW Ham2K Polo |
| Operation Totals |
| 23 QSOs 7 DXCC Entities 5 P2P 4 S2S 4 Band and 2 modes 40m – 17 SSB 20m – 4 SSB 10m – 1 SSB 2m – 1 FM |
