Tuesday 30 May 2017

27th May 2017. GW/NW-040 SOTA Activation visit.

GW/NW-040. 27th May 2017.
Grid SH 729727. Altitude 610M.

SOTA Activation for this Bank Holiday weekend was to Tal y Fan GW/NW-040 near Conwy North Wales. I left my home QTH (Telford) at 08:05 a.m. and headed towards Wales on the A5. I gave a call on 2M and managed to hold a QSO with M0JZH (John) a fellow club member, he was on his way to Wales with his trailer tent for a break. We managed to stay in contact until just past Wrexham.
I arrived at Conwy for 10:00 a.m. and then took a further 20 minutes to get to my parking spot as some of the roads are very narrow. I strongly recommend not going over the small road from Rowan as this gets very narrow. I have added a photo below showing a better route to the car park area. Use the green route and not the orange.
The centre photo is from the road by the car parking area, so you can see this is a very easy 4 point summit as informed by G4ERP. I reached the summit in around 25 - 30 minutes with a few stops for photo's.
As you follow the track up you have to cross 3 styles over the walls and when you reach the rock formations near the summit there are 2 or 3 smaller paths up over the stones but all are fairly easy.

Once I had arrived and took a few more photo's I set up my 2M Dipole and started calling CQ SOTA at 11:10 a.m. and had my first contact straight away with GW4ZPL/P (John), followed by a further 6 more contacts including EI9GLB (Jim) in Ireland.
I was alone on this summit except a fell runner that passed the summit, Jamie had stayed at home so no bacon and black pudding sandwich today. I will have to have words with Jamie lol.

Sunday 21 May 2017

20th May 2017. GW/NW-039 SOTA Activation visit.

GW/NW-039 20th May 2017.
Grid SH 953423. Altitude 611M.

This weekend saw our first visit to Foel Goch situated around 4 1/2 miles to the North East of Bala. We left home at 08:10 a.m. and headed towards Wales on the A5. We reached Grid SH 97616 45565 and followed the sign post to Llangwm, then followed on until we reached Grid SH 96259 43502 where we parked the car at around 10:10 a.m.

The ascent took around 40 minutes and was not too bad except the driving rain. When we arrived we set up a wind/rain break with our tarpaulin as seen in the photo's below. Once the radio was set up Jamie started his usual job of cooking our infamous bacon and black pudding roll's. They went down a treat. The QSO's came in fast and within 6 minutes we had qualified the summit, we carried on and logged 15 contacts in just over 40 minutes with a few minutes break for food.

This was our first SOTA activation for 5 weeks so we decided only to set up 2M with a new dipole that I had built last week and it seamed to do its job very well.