After the Cornwall holiday, Marianne introduced another rule into the Read household.  "When we are on holiday, you may do ONE SOTA activation and no more".  So having activated Butser Hill two days previous, prospects for this one were not good, even though it sat just off the A34 near Newbury, near the beginning of our route home.  However, the weather was nice, I suggested another picnic, and to my astonishment and eternal joy, the proposal was accepted with an uncharacteristic wry grin from Marianne.

We left the A34 south-west of Newbury and due east of the hill, then followed the country lanes through the villages until winding up the ascending lane to the car park that sits on the edge of the escarpment just east of the summit.  There is a stony track from this car park, across to another car park that lies to the west of the summit.  Marianne and Liam decided to walk between the car parks, but Jimmy and myself (of course) turned left at the highest point of the track to walk up another track to the trig point.

Again, contacts were difficult to come by, even on a Saturday afternoon in the VHF vacuum that is the South of England.  I managed to grab one off a repeater, then another fifteen minutes later.  I was then happy to stumble across a strong special event station in QSO with an even stronger station.  Bingo!  Or so I thought.  The special event station had some technical problems, so I had to wait around 20 minutes before attempting a QSO.  Once in QSO, the operator couldn't get all my details because of the noise of the HF operator in the same shack at the event!  The supply voltage displayed on my 817 began to indicate that my 2300mAH pack was running out.  Presuming that no further activating would be tolerated, I had not recharged the battery after Butser Hill!  I managed to complete the contact with the special event station on 1 watt, before managing to QSY with the other station on frequency, for a fairly broken exchange of callsigns and reports.   I did manage to open with "Batteries running out", and Steve M1GWH was brilliant, going straight into contest style and exchanging the details.  I reduced the power further to 0.5 watts during this 4th QSO, and managed to complete.  The FT-817 shut down with a final push of the PTT on 0.5 watts after completing!  Phew, that was close!

Callsign was MX1SWL/P, the club callsign of the ISWL.  Thanks to the following stations, all worked on 2m FM: