Day 3 - Tuesday 27th July 2010 (part 2)

This hill was chosen to provide a suitable point from which to combine a SOTA activation with participation in the 6m UK activity contest. In the event, I'm not sure it was such a good site, but SWR was not exactly perfect on the delta loop either, so I will need to look at the antenna.

   

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!