Tuesday 31st December 2019 - New Year's Eve

Gig:  Serious Hat Band

Venue:  Iscoyd Park, Whitchurch

I deliberated for some time over a suitable summit to activate en route to my New Year's Eve gig.  Whatever selection was made, I knew I would have to drive beyond the gig venue anyway, if I was to undertake a points scoring activation.  Eventually it dawned on me that I had not done Foel Goch in 2019; it was the ideal summit - not too far beyond my place of work for the evening, and a fairly easy, relatively quick and straight-forward walk - yet attracting four points plus a further three courtesy of the winter bonus.  Perfect!

I parked along the long cul-de-sac down to Cwm-llan and started the walk up the grassy slope rising above the glacial valley.  I took the SB5 and tablet, hoping to catch the tail-end of the recent remarkable tropo and some tasty FT8 DX. 

At the saddle I turned right and followed the faint grassy and occasionally boggy path as it weaved up towards the summit.  At the top it was very windy, and with a touch of rain it was unpleasantly hostile!  Any lingering thoughts of setting up for WSJT-X operation on VHF were immediately dismissed, and I went for it on the 2m handheld.  It turned out I'd left the feeder in the car anyway!

Happily, five minutes operating brought five QSOs, including S2S with Caroline M3ZCB/P and Martyn M1MAJ/P who were on Fair Snape Fell G/SP-007.  This was activation #388 in the year for me, beating my previous record of 367 set in 2018.  Happy New Year everyone!