It would have appeared that Marianne wanted a bit of peace and quiet, for she instructed me to take the lads away for the long Easter weekend. Naturally, thoughts turned to areas of new unique activations, but there had to be something in it for Liam as well. So where could offer us unactivated summits into double figures, as well as arcades and curry houses?

Answer: Barry, South Wales.

I originally booked very cheap accommodation at the Sky Plaza near Cardiff Airport (much closer to Barry than Cardiff), but Jimmy alerted me to the dreadful reviews and photos on Trip Advisor and other such sites. When all my emails to the hotel bounced saying "Mailbox full", I decided to cancel the booking!  Instead, I booked in at the highly regarded Aberthaw House Hotel in Barry itself, and this proved to be a lovely place, family run, with clean comfortable rooms and excellent breakfasts. They didn't have any twin rooms left, but they offered me three singles for the same price as a twin and a single. When we arrived, they actually gave us two "singles" - where the beds appeared to be more like small doubles, and a double. So a comfortable and spacious en suite room each for the three of us - luxurious!

The tour kicked off on the afternoon of Thursday 17th April 2014, with Liam and I driving up from Macclesfield to pick up Jimmy M0HGY from his office in Wilmslow. We then picked our way through the country lanes to Holmes Chapel as we endeavoured to avoid the start of the Bank Holiday rush hour traffic. Shortly after, we were pulling in at Keele services on the M6 for our evening meal of KFC.  The roads remained fairly clear down the M6, M5 and M4, although we were stung for a £6.50 toll after crossing the River Severn into Wales. We checked in at the B&B shortly before 10pm - and went straight to bed. We agreed to meet at 7am in the breakfast room.

Good Friday 18th April 2014 - Wentwood GW/SW-033

The basic plan was to work through the GW/SW one pointers, south of the Brecon Beacons, from East to West. Hence we first drove out to Wentwood for what would be one of the easiest summits of the weekend.  We parked in the wide track entrance at ST414945 and walked the fairly flat 300 metres or so to the summit. As usual, Jimmy and I set up independently, while Liam played on his portable games console. For this trip, I was using the SOTA Beams end-fed halfwave antenna and Micro Z tuner, in order to provide the option of "insurance" bands if 12m was not performing, or if Jimmy was struggling on 2m. This system and strategy worked extremely well, although the slight downside was that for 24MHz, the antenna was not quite as effective as my single band groundplane quarterwave for 12m - which I guess is to be suspected.

What didn't help was that the 12m band was in less than excellent shape during this weekend! This was where the EFHW + Micro Z system came to my rescue. I managed to get S2S with S52CU/P on S5/CP-022 and another 12m QSO with G4WTF, but that was it. I retuned the antenna for 30m and worked EA2CW/P on EA2/BI-063 and then to 20m for F6HBI/P on F/AM-467 for a couple of S2S contacts to qualify the summit. Meanwhile, Jimmy MW0HGY/P managed to get the four contacts all on 2m FM using a SOTAbeams MFD.

So a successful start, and now it was off to Mynydd Twyn-glas GW/SW-019.