9 SOTA activations in the day - a new personal record

31 activator points collected - but no S2S (perhaps not surprising!)

Storm Freya following me through the day!

The Shropshire Five is a classic SOTA day out, and a “must-do” for all serious activators.  I was noticing that several such serious activators had indeed been completing this suite of summits in this early part of 2019 - well, who wouldn’t, with the 150% boost on offer courtesy of the winter bonus?  So how could I make mine different? Turn the Shropshire Five into the Shropshire Six.  The Shropshire Five already includes one summit that isn’t even in England, never mind Shropshire, so why not two?  I greedily thought that if I could add in Gyrn Moelfre GW/NW-049 at the end, I could turn my 25 points into 30 - not a bad haul for a day out.

As Del Boy would say, I’d need to “whip round them a bit lively” - so the plan was to go mega lightweight with 2m FM handheld only - no problem in this part of the world.  For most of the activations I wouldn’t even bother with a rucksack - just stuff the handheld and logbook into a coat pocket and go for it!

I set off from Macclesfield at 0530 on Sunday 3rd March 2019, and breakfasted at McDonald’s in Bridgnorth around 0700.  It was a sausage, egg and cheese bagel, with hash brown and Tropicana orange juice, for those of you that follow these things.  I parked at the picnic area, from which probably the most pleasant of the three main routes up Brown Clee Hill originates.  In fact there’s a couple of variations available here.  Once into the picnic area you can bear right or left.  I couldn’t remember which was the way, so I went right.  I was soon on an unfamiliar but good graded path, angling upslope through dense forestry - so I must have gone left last time!  This led out onto the tarmac access road for the transmitter site, but near to the summit plateau.

At the top I did suspect significant desensing of my rig from the close by masts, as well as the audible pager QRM.  As such, hearing incoming reports was quite challenging, but I got qualified with five 2m FM QSOs inside nine minutes.  For the descent, I looked for the path off the summit plateau down towards the woods, in order to make it a circular walk.  As I got into the wooded section, I noticed that a BMX bike track had been crafted into the soil, so I followed this back down to the road.  I didn’t use the ramp to bunny-hop over the gate though.  Next, it was over to Titterstone Clee Hill G/WB-004.