Wapley Hill, G/WB-016 - 329m ASL - SO 346 624 - OS Explorer 203 - 1 SOTA point           

SOTA road trip, Day 7 - Friday 7th August 2020

From Burton Hill G/WB-020, it was a drive of about 20km in an overall NNW direction, to the car park situated due East of the summit just into the woods.  It was after 9pm local, so I was very much walking in twilight, and expecting to return by torchlight!  What I wasn't expecting was how long the activation was going to take me!

Despite being very tired at the end of a long - nine summit - day, I marched along the forest tracks at a good pace.  I reached the clearing with bench and information board, just ahead of the Iron Age fort ramparts at the summit.  I decided that would be the ideal place to set up the 17m groundplane antenna.

Despite there being FT8 activity on the band, no-one at all came back to my CQ calls.  I tried answering the CQ calls of other stations active on 17m FT8, but to no avail.  I trotted over to and up onto the fort ramparts and called on the handheld.  This got me Matt 2E0MDJ and Stewart G0LGS in the log on VHF, but I still needed that 17m contact for the Challenge multiplier.  I persisted with FT8 and eventually got CT7AQS - over an hour after I'd worked the Cheltenham pair.  But still I needed a fourth QSO to qualify the activation, and it wasn't coming!  Ultimately, I went to the 20m band on my rig, which was buzzing.  I knew that the VSWR on my 17m aerial would be bad - but if I was on FT4, at least the contact would be over quickly!  This tactic worked and I easily got WO3T in Pennsylvania to be able to pack up and walk back to the car.

I managed to drive for a couple of hours up into Shropshire, but fatigue beat me, and I was never going to make it all the way home this night.  I whacked the car heater on full blast and started looking out for a nice big dark lay-by.  Once found and parked, I reclined my seat, grabbed my pillows from the back seat, took my blood pressure pills and drifted off to sleep.  After waking up early the next morning, I was able to check the quality and duration of my sleep using the Fitbit app on my iPhone, fed with data from my Fitbit tracker watch.  From this, I could see, as well as feel, that I was sufficiently rested to drive again, and headed for Gun G/SP-013 and The Cloud G/SP-015 before finally getting home - with some gifts for the family.