I was attempting to drive home after a Sunday night gig in London's West End.  After Toddington services, I managed it all the way to Newport Pagnell services before needing to stop for a rest. I reclined my driver’s seat for a short nap. 2.5 hours fast asleep later…

At least I was now refreshed to continue driving safely back home - on Monday 11th December 2017. Only thing was, I realised I must have missed the M6 turning off the M1 (including ignoring the SatNav) when I started seeing signs for Nottingham. I suddenly had an idea! At the next services, I pulled in and added a waypoint to my SatNav route - Vercor Close, Coalville!

Vercor Close was covered in substantial snow, and I wonder how deep it might be on Bardon Hill G/CE-004 itself. In fact, it was fairly well compacted on all the paths, so the walking was easy. At one possible right turn in the woods, I wasn’t sure if it was that one, or further down so I carried on. It was that one - but I was happy to explore a little anyway, so I continued. I kept following the path and woods around to the right as the path very gradually ascended. Eventually, the gradient intensified and I was on the access track for the mast installation on the summit.

I was on summit well before dawn and setting up my 20m GP. The RBN was spotting me OK, but it looked like I was only getting detected with a very weak signal by a skimmer in Bulgaria! Nobody came back to me, and I had no success at all when I tried to answer some other strong CQ calls on the band. I resorted to the handheld and made a couple of contacts on 2m FM. Eventually, a huge signal came back to me on 20m CW. I assumed that the band must have opened into Central Europe at last, and sent “QRX” while I got my logbook and pencil ready again. The very loud signal came back and repeated his call: “ZL1BYZ”. Wow! I gave John his genuine 599 report, and received a 529 back from him.

Later, John was kind enough to email me a copy of a recording he made of my signal on the other side of the world: Two more QSOs were made on 2m FM, and just one more on 20m CW - definitely a case of quality rather than quantity!