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Day 3 - Tuesday 27th July 2010 (part 2) We parked in the summit car park on Kit Hill, leaving only a short walk and
final ascent onto the chosen activating point. While much improved from
Brown Willy G/DC-002 earlier, it was still
a damp and gloomy night, so I set up the small tent I sometimes utilise for
contest activations. Everything was ready a good 35 minutes before the contest start time, but I
wasn't happy with the SWR on 6m. Fiddling around, I found that the best SWR
reading was on 12m! A couple of stations were heard CQing on 24MHz, so I tried
to answer them. They both called me in first time, and easy contacts were had
with RA2FF (Kaliningrad) and AO5GL (Spain). The next hour and a half was dismal as we tried, and failed to make a single
contact in the contest on 6m. In the end I set trusty old 40m up in order that
we get the SOTA activation even if not a contest entry. Jimmy got his quota of 4
on 40m SSB, before I added 1 x 40m SSB and 4 x 40m CW to my two earlier 12m CW
contacts. It wasn't the evening we'd had in mind, but at least, I had still qualified the summit in LESS time (2 hours and 5 minutes) than it had taken me in 2004 (2 hours 28 minutes)! Late nights back at the tent were becoming the norm and poor Craig didn't know what had hit him - and I realised that Jimmy and Liam have unusually high stamina levels. Craig was taking to having a sleep on every car journey, and taking a nap on every summit as well! We would have a well-deserved day off from hiking the following day, and hit the beach instead!
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