South Wales SOTA Trip - Day 5 (part 3) - Thursday 28th May 2015

I got Jimmy to direct me from Fan Nedd GW/SW-007, to the parking spot for Mynydd Eppynt GW/SW-018.  There are plenty of places to pull the car in, in the vicinty of the junction at SN963467.  The summit, within a military artillery range, remainded strictly out-of-bounds, so it was necessary to operate using SOTA's activation zone rule.  This meant a trivial short walk of a few footsteps from the car to the barrier, beside which we erected our antennas.

28MHz was working again, and a good job that it was - because 145MHz was not!  Hence Jimmy came over to my station at a point where he still hadn't secured a single contact!  Of course, after qualifying with four 10m SSB contacts, he then tried another call on 2m - and got two more stations!

I now had an idea.  YHA Llanddeusant was a self-catering hostel, and I fancied doing a bit of shopping on the way back there, and doing some home-made food for tea.  We called in at the supermarket in Llandovery and picked up ingredients - and of course some bottled local ales.  So after the shower and change at the hostel, I got to work in the members' kitchen and cooked up a scrummy pasta pake.  The lads and I got stuck in, going for seconds and thirds until the huge potful I had prepared was all gone.  The beers flowed into the evening as we sat and played Trivial Pursuit in the hostel lounge, before getting to bed.  We had completed all forty-one of the South Wales SOTA summits.  For the next day, then plan was to do some trivial repeat summits - and maybe break our record for activations in a day.  We would kick off with nearby Mynydd Uchaf GW/SW-031.