Today I thought I would activate the highest point in the Black Mountains for a score of 8 points. I was going out for a walk with my girlfriend anyway so I roped her in to share the carrying of the weight as I am currently using my hefty Yaesu FT-897D.
We parked at the end of a small lane above Pengenffordd to start the 3 mile walk. The ascent was 490 metres of slogging, but the route we chose is up a very nice ridge and we had fairly good visibility today. Thankfully it was fairly cloudy or we have been even more soaked in sweat by the time we got to Waun Fach.
There has been a lot of path work done on Waun Fach recently and there is a nice dry stone path heading from Waun Fach towards Pen-Y-Gadiar. I didn’t actually recognise the summit as the peaty bowl seems to have gone. I did come prepared with some home made peat/snow stakes though and they were required. They are 535mm long, 1×1″ made from 1.5mm thick aluminium.
There was a small patch of decent ground inside the curves of the new path and we set up there. Something else new to me on Waun Fach were biting midges! I’d planned to use the beach shelter to operate from, but it became a midge shelter too!
Inside the midge shelter
Improvements from my first day’s activations last week are the use of my digital clock from my VHF contest kit for QSO times and printed log sheets and clipboard rather than a make-do notepad. Also peg hammer (although not needed here, pegs just pushed into the soft peat) reduced from 300 gram rubber mallet to 106 gram bright yellow plastic hammer for £1.
Unfortunately I couldn’t get any service on my 3 network when I wanted it (it did kick in now and then) so I was unable to spot myself even by SMS. Or even tell my mate what frequency I was on to spot me. So QSOs were slow. Instead of 2 or 3 a minute it was a QSO every 2 or 3 minutes at best.
I did manage 21 QSOs with one Summit 2 Summit QSO. A lot of lighthouses were being activated today!
