After six years of trying to climb everything within my reach, I’ve finally done it. I achieved SOTA Mountain Goat status. In September we visited the Lake District for a holiday (before lockdown 2) and as usual did a lot of walking up to the various peaks in this region. I had four days to ...
On Monday the 7th September I did a live YouTube stream for the RSGB ‘Tonight at 8’ series. It gives an overview of getting out on the hills and taking part in SOTA, tips and tricks and lots of photos from activations around the world. It was received well and you can rewatch it for ...
During November me and two friends met up and travelled up to Snowdonia for a weekend of hill walking. The forecast had been for heavy rain throughout (pretty common for Snowdonia!), but come Saturday morning we were awoken to a glorious blanket of snow. As we ate our full Welsh breakfast in the cafe, we ...
While on holiday in the Lake District, I visited the SOTA summit of Red Screes (G/LD-017) for a 2m SSB contest. While there I also activated it for SOTA using 2m FM, here’s the resulting pile-up using 25 watts and a vertical Moxon:
While on holiday in the Lake District I decided to try a spot of VHF contesting from one of the many SOTA summmits in the area. I chose the SOTA summit of Red Screes (G/LD-017, 6 points) and operated in the RSGB 2m Backpackers contest. The video shows my experience and live QSOs:
While on a hiking holiday recently I was able to activate a number of SOTA summits on the Balearic island of Mallorca (IOTA EU-004). I was there with my YL (Christina) and we had set our sights on Mallorca’s second highest mountain (Massanella – EA6/MA-002). All activations were secondary to the actual hiking, so no ...
Work recently took me back to California, and specifically to San Francisco, which I’d not visited before. Naturally enough I checked the nearby SOTA summits to see if I could sneak in an activation. Mount Davidson (W6/NC-423) seemed to fit the bill nicely, it’s easy to get to with public transport, not too much of ...
Having activated Pen Y Fan (GW/SW-001 – 886m ASL – 8 points) four times previously, I was looking for something new to do. My wife was taking part in a Mountain Midnight Marathon again, which runs up southern Britains highest mountain (and then back down), so I’d have a few hours up at the summit ...
While on holiday in the Lake District with the YL in July, I activated ten SOTA summits. The focus of these walks was not SOTA, but instead all day walking, so brevity and lightweight gear was the order of the day – 2m FM was the natural choice. We chose to do Scafell Pike (G/LD-001 ...
Each year I’m sent away to Boston, MA on a company conference, this year I decided to take the radio and activate some of the nearby (well nearish) SOTA summits. I’d planned with some likeminded colleagues to visit the White Mountains in New Hampshire, about 3 hours north of Boston. We’d arrive on Friday evening ...