After activating Watch Hill and getting back to the car, I set off towards the parking spot I had picked. I got there ok and got parked up and picked my bag up again and started walking.
Had to walk along the road for a bit before I turned and started to head up the track. The first walk of the day was a nice gentle slope, this was a bit steeper and I felt it. Had to stop a couple of times to catch my breath but the walk was really nice and the views were something else as they always are in the Lakes.
The hill was quiet and I did not see many people until right before I got to the top.
Once at the top I got set up again and used the flowerpot to start with and worked a few of the contacts I had worked on Watch Hill. Only England this time on 2m but you cannot have good DX on 2m every time.
It took me 10 mins to get 4 in the log to activate for SOTA, I carried on with 2m for another 10 mins and only got one more contact. If I want 10 in total it was time to switch to HF. I swapped the flowerpot for the EFLW and had a look at the spotting page to see if there were any summits or parks I could hunt. I saw 2 operators were on G/LD-008 Blencathra which was one of the hills I had thought about activating on this trip.
I called them in reply to their CQ call managed to work Jake M0PVC/P and Tom M1TJM/P, we had a little bit of confusion as they kept saying M0LZN/P and I don’t use the /P but got it all sorted.
There were no other summits I could contact but found DC2CB which is a club station for Wurzberg University, they were activating DE-0023 Steigerwald Nature Park on 20m and managed to hunt them.
I called CQ for a bit but was getting nothing so I switched to FT8 and got 2 more contacts to bring it up to 10 for the POTA activation.
I should have been looking at the skies instead of focusing on the radio, the skies behind me had turned grey and I could see rain in the distance, time to get packed up and off the hill.
The walk down was quite and windy but nothing I have not done before, I did put the rucksack cover on as I did not want it or the contents soaked.
I got back to car and set off for the final hill of the day.
| Operation Details |
| Park: https://pota.app/#/park/GB-0165 Summit: https://www.sotadata.org.uk/en/summit/G/LD-042 Grid square: IO84ho WAB square: NY12 |
| Working Conditions |
| Icom IC-705 Icom AH-705 Sotabeams tactical mini Sotabeams EFLW Homemade Flower pot for 2m Ham2K Polo |
| Operation Totals |
| 10 QSOs 2 DXCC Entities 2 S2S 3 Band and 3 modes 40m – 2 FT8, 2 SSB 20m – 1 SSB 2m – 5 FM |
