Saturday 24th March 2018

Four and run?  OK, hands up, I did it. It wasn’t an accident, it was deliberate.  It was in fact premeditated.  I plead guilty!

I had a dep gig at the Merchant Taylors Hall in York.  This was with a wedding band, none of whom I knew before, but who had booked me on the strength of a third party recommendation.  Basically, it was appropriate to turn up on time!  During the morning, I was writing out an arrangement/orchestration ahead of a recording session with a different band on the Sunday, and took a little longer than anticipated to complete that work.  So I was a little late setting out for my Yorkshire gig.  Well, early if I was going directly there, but late if I wanted to bag an activation en route!

To get to G/TW-004, I had to drive past York and onto the A166 Bridlington road. I kept an eye on my satnav ETA.  On arrival at the roadside summit, I figured that I had, essentially, twenty minutes to walk to the operating point, set up, activate, pack away and get back to the car.  The “walk” being a 50 yard slog over horizontal ground certainly helped, but nonetheless, the time window was tight! 

I did briefly check the handheld for any local VHF activity.  There wasn’t any, so I got straight on with erecting my newly built 20m groundplane antenna.  My alert was posted on SOTAwatch, so all I had to do was find a clear QRG and call CQ SOTA.  Keeping one eye on my smartphone, I could see that I had been received with a strong signal in Canada, so I carried on calling and waited for the chasers to respond.  In the space of three minutes, I worked three US stations, and one in Bulgaria. I allowed myself one last QRZ? call - which was not answered - and I immediately went QRT and packed up.  Four-and-run?  You bet!  I got to my gig on time!