Date
1 - 12 of 12
SOTA activation
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Hi all,
Andrew (MW1CJE) and myself (MW0KYB) will be activating GW/SW-003 (Fan Brycheiniog) in Wales on Saturday (this weekend) around 12.00-12.30. It’s 803m, 2nd highest in South Wales I think. Andrew will be on 145.500. I will be around 14.290 initially, then around 7.120 a bit later. We’ll spot ourselves on SOTAwatch at the summit. Hopefully we’ll be able to work some of you, listen out for us if you can! Here’s hoping the weather is kind to us. Marc |
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Graham (G4OED)
Hi Marc,
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I hope you have your contest logging software with you. You will need it! Good luck Graham G4OED On 25 Mar 2023, at 00:14, Marc (M0KYB) <marc@...> wrote:
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Kept a watch on SOTA Watch and put a couple of calls out for Andrew on 145.500 as soon as I saw him spot, but nothing heard.
Heard you Marc, just about, on both 20m and 40m, but you were about 3/1 and we wouldn't have managed a QSO, although I did try giving you a couple of calls. I could hear other stations working you. On the plus side, I made a couple of decent contacts on the CQ WPX contest; not big numbers, but I was hunting the more difficult DX entities. As try as I might, I couldn't work VJ4K who was absolutely booming to me, but I got some nice American entities and Saudi. 73 Dom, 2E0WHQ |
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Andrew (M1CJE)
If anyone would like to see where we went yesterday, I have attached a kml file that you can open in google earth and view our route.
https://earth.google.com/web/ then click the projects button and import the file. 73s Andrew - M1CJE |
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Elwyn Carter
Andrew, just looked at the route on the map , that must have been a challenging walk and it was probably pretty Cold as well. Well Done, hope Marc enjoyed it as well.
Elwyn
From: sdarc@groups.io <sdarc@groups.io> On Behalf Of Andrew (M1CJE)
Sent: 26 March 2023 17:52 To: sdarc@groups.io Subject: Re: [sdarc] SOTA activation
If anyone would like to see where we went yesterday, I have attached a kml file that you can open in google earth and view our route. |
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Hi All,
What a great weekend that was! 2.5 hour drive to Wales, 2 hours of punishing uphill walking (for me anyway), 800m of elevation is not a walk in the park! 30-40mph wind at the top to make us feel welcome on arrival. But in fairness, we were lucky with the weather and stayed dry at least. Some great map reading and navigation lessons from Andrew on the way, and encouragement to get me to the top. I can confirm Andrew is fit and I'm not! Setting up a HF antenna in these conditions was not the easiest of things ... but we did it and managed about 25 or so contacts as far as Greece and Spain until we were both frozen and had enough. Sorry we weren't quite strong enough to work some of you. Then a lovely 1.5 hour walk down for a bite to eat and then another 2.5 hour drive back to Swindon. Quick shower when I got home and then straight to the shack for the remainder of the CQ WPX contest. A few hours sleep at midnight and then back to it early morning. Conditions were good, although 10m never really 'sparkled' like it did last year. I ended up with 593 contacts with 399 prefixes worked, for a total of 435,000 points, see the map below. I only did 16 of the 36 hours permitted. Highlights (and new countries on SSB for me) were Sable Island, New Caledonia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. I was unassisted so probably missed a few other rare ones. The Sable Island pile-up was stupendous, almost as bad as the Bouvet behaviour. I let them get on with it and came back right at the end (many hours later) to find the pile-up had died down a lot, and was straight in. That's a valuable lesson I think, advice Tony G4LDL gave me. Marc  |
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Love this close-up of the GPS tracking us setting up the HF antenna (linked 20-40m inverted V dipole on a 6m telescopic pole) at the top!
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Marc and Andrew Well done to the two of you on your SOTA trip. I would be interested to know details of your antenna setups for HF and 2m. I have SOTAwatch3 app installed on my Android mobile. I kept watch on it between roughly 12.00 - 12.45 but did not see any of your spots. Was I too early? Is this app where you were spotting or, as is most likely, it was just me? 73 John 2E0JJC On Mon, 27 Mar 2023, 1:41 pm Marc (M0KYB), <marc@...> wrote: Hi All, |
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Well done Mark
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Sent from Jeff M0UHF
On 27 Mar 2023, at 13:58, Marc (M0KYB) <marc@...> wrote:
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Tony (G4LDL)
Well done guys. Sat in that shelter many a time in sun, wind, rain and snow. I should have warned you about Andrew’s pace, I could never keep up with him (more correctly he always had to wait for me!).
I saw your 2m spots and listened but moved off to WPX (10m was buzzing), so hadn’t realised you had moved to HF. I’m annoyed at that.
73 Tony, G4LDL.
From: sdarc@groups.io <sdarc@groups.io> On Behalf Of Marc (M0KYB)
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2023 1:59 PM To: sdarc@groups.io Subject: Re: [sdarc] SOTA activation
Love this close-up of the GPS tracking us setting up the HF antenna (linked 20-40m inverted V dipole on a 6m telescopic pole) at the top! |
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Andrew (M1CJE)
John,
You should see our spots on that app but you were too early. We posted three spots, (2m, 20m & 40m) between about 13:30 and 14:00. I was using an MFJ long ranger antenna on 2m which is an end fed half wave telescopic. Andrew |
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Thanks Andrew. Shame I was too early monitoring. Unfortunately, about the time you posted, I was well into my second pint at my local rugby club pre-match lunch. John On Mon, 27 Mar 2023, 8:03 pm Andrew (M1CJE), <andrew@...> wrote: John, |
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