Dooish Mountain, EI/IN-081 - 266m ASL - C 300 107 - OSNI Discoverer 6, 7 - 1 SOTA point            

GI SOTA Trip - Activation #15 - Dooish Mountain EI/IN-081 - Friday 3rd June 2016

I awoke to a strange noise of quiet knocking at my door. One eye open. One ear open. "Dad, you've overslept" came the animated whisper. I checked my clock - 4.35am. Yes, we'd agreed a 4am start - but I'd not thought to adjust my alarms - doh!

Anyway, with Jimmy up and fully ready, and me at least 25 minutes ahead of the usual 5am start time, the mission was still doable. I asked Jim to get on with filling the bladders and putting them in rucksacks in the car, and empty the cans of mulligatawny soup into the pan. Then I took over the stove duties and got Jim to load our bags etc. We were still away before 5am.

The originally alerted EI summit, for the Tuesday, was Crockkinnagoe EI/IN-061. My plan now was to work West to East starting with an EI summit, and then dealing with the two summits always planned for this day, and the one omitted from yesterday. Therefore, the chosen "bonus EI summit" was changed to Dooish Mountain EI/IN-081 very close to the border near Strabane.

After a drive of about 25 miles North from the B&B and crossing the border near Strabane, we parked in the forest track entrance at C304113. From here it was an easy walk of about 800m to the trig point along a good track. The trig point was in amongst an area of heather and grasses about 20m from the track.

The first contact made by either of us was Jimmy's 2m FM contact with Robert MI0GDO at 0548. Robert took some persuading that Jimmy was EI/M0HGY/P and not EI/MI0HGY/P! I struggled to get any momentum on HF too, with just one QSO on each of 40m CW, 30m CW and 20m CW in half an hour!

Jimmy took over on HF and managed to get his qualification, albeit still slowly, adding four 40m SSB QSOs in another 33 minutes. Trying again, I managed a 40m SSB QSO and two on 40m CW as 7MHz began to wake up. The early start is good for affording extra walking time, but does often resign one to a slow QSO rate!

Anyway, we were back to the car by 8.30am local, with one activation safely in the bag. The plan for the day was intact, and we commenced our drive back into the Sperrin Mountains, and Owenreagh Hill GI/SM-011.