On Thursday 8th August 2013 I had plans for three summits, with an aspiration to possibly add a fourth. As it was, I ran out of steam, energy, enjoyment, will to live and all that, and just ended up doing two.  It was a later than preferred start from Macclesfield as I had to drop Liam off at an activity at 10am. The navigation difficulties of the previous day continued to plague me as I made a meal out of finding my way to Rombalds Moor G/NP-028.

       

I was surprised to find an excellent stone flagged path down all the way from the car park to the trig point. I couldn't remember whether this was the case on my last visit a few years ago, but do recall that there was a lot of bog-hopping in my first few activations of this one!  This, in contrast, was a breeze, and the heathery moorland was a very pleasant place to be. Of course, the parking area is within 20m vertically of the summit, so technically in the activation zone, so there is no need to walk all the way to the trig point. But I was here for a walk as well as amateur radio, so trig point it was for me!

       

Contacts were hard to come by on 12m. In fact all three that I did get - two on CW and one on SSB - were all local groundwave. In order to qualify the summit, I had to get a contact on 2m FM with the handie. My Mini Palm Paddle had stopped working completely, and all my attempts to fix it failed - miserably. Not wanting to do any CW-less activations, I set the FT-817 to Mic keyer mode and used the Up/Down buttons on my FT-817 fist mike to send CW. I could only do this with my thumbs at 12wpm, but it was not necessary for chasers to QRS as I could still read at my usual speed!

       

What with the late start from Macc, and my pathetic road navigation, time was already cracking on. The next intended summit was Sharp Haw G/NP-029 - and so it was.