The past weekend was spent at home catching up on a few things around the house. There was also plenty of opportunities to chase some SOTA activators on both days.
Saturday saw Wayne, VK3WAM, was out early attempting to activate four summits, Kevin, VK3KAB, was aiming for two, Marshall, VK3MRG, and Al, VK1RX, had planned one each.
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| FT7 at my first activation |
With the assistance of sotawatch.org I was able took work Kevin 3 times, Wayne twice and Marshall and Al once each.
Sunday was quieter for activators with Allan, VK3HRA, planning three summits and a new activator Mark, VK3PI, attempting his first SOTA hilltop outing.
Allen’s signal from his first hill, Mt Bride, proved too weak for me to work from home with it being lost in the local noise. A quick trip to the local Scout hall didn’t help either. A very weak signal with fading to make it even harder. his second and third summits were no problems at all. A good solid signal from both.
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| VK3ZPF SOTA logger |
Mark, VK3PI, chose Mt Disappointment for his first time out and was rewarded with many QSOs. He was using a BuddiePole with a Yaesu FT7. When I heard him mention the FT7 I pulled mine out from under the bench and we made an FT7 to FT7 QSO. It’s been over a year since I used this radio which was for my first SOTA activation at Mt Dandenong.
On Sunday morning I read on the sotawatch reflector that Andy, MF0MFM had made some changes to the CSV file input to the SOTA database to allow the inclusion of Summit to Summit contacts. I have been looking forward to this and I have now changed the code in my SOTA logger to make use of this new function.
Now I just need to get back out onto some summits to make full use of the S2S feature.
73