As things have been quiet lately I have been doing other things that need attending to but I needed a radio fix. First I thought I’d pop up to my local drive on site that I use for testing antennas and setting up mast systems etc, but then I though why not pop up to Garway Hill G/WB-013 again to activate that again. So I did.
There is a small space to park at SO444247 that is possible to fit a few cars in. A fairly gentle but continuous slope takes you up the obvious track leading to the top field and trig point. The walk up is only a half mile and 121 metres of ascent.
Took my two daughters (both early 20s now) to get them some fresh air, but soon left the eldest to push the youngest’s wheelchair up the hill for me as time was getting on and it’s slow hard work especially with a decent rucksack on your back as well.
By the time I reached the summit the view had gone. This is a picture the girls took on the way up.
At least it wasn’t actually raining. Yet.
For this activation I had considerably reduced the pack weight. Most of it by switching from the FT-987D to a new FT-857D. I also left the beach shelter at home though I would have been better operating from it as it turned out. Also I saved a fair bit of weight switching from a steel lump hammer for the pegs to a lightweight plastic one.
That was very nice, though the hard ground and light hammer did require some fairly furious hammering to get the small tent pegs in. This resulted in a wild inaccurate swing terminating at my forefinger which is sporting a nice lump and bruise today.
System set up I started on 20m, found a free frequency and spotted myself with Rucksack Radio Tool. Good signal on Garway with Three. I even saw 4G flash up now and then!
No instant pile up tonight, but first contact was in the States, and most of first 10 were too. A nice start. Interestingly, although inverted V antennas are meant to be pretty much omni-directional I did set up with the dipole broadside on to East and West. Steady going, longest gap between QSOs about 3 or 4 minutes. With 23 QSOs in the bag including a Stateside S2S (just!) I decided to switch to 40m to see what was about. I also switched to the other battery at the same time to share the drain.
40m seemed pretty busy and finding a free frequency without an adjacent strong signal took a little while and wasn’t necessarily a 100% success on the lack of adjacent strong signals. I did notice a lot of my QSO signals were really strong both ways. The QSOs came in slow but steady getting 30 QSOs in about 40 minutes. During which I had to get out the umbrella and hold it down with my rucksack and edge the radio underneath into the dry. A lull in callers was an opportune moment to go QRT as my girls by now were bored and cold. I was wet and cold. Although it was only about 14°C the water and air cooling had turned my fingers pretty stiff and I was shaking a bit with the cold. Pretty sure my personal CPU was running slow too! All would have been prevented in the beach shelter.
“Man who not make mistake not make anything”
Overall 53 QSOs and one Summit to Summit contact.
