Half way there and back again - SOTA

For a while now I have been staring at the SOTA Maps and especially eyeing all the summits that have zero activations. There are quite a few within my area, and it is really cool that I can potentially be the first to activate them. Some of them require quite a bit of effort, but some are not that hard to activate. Some of the summits I have already been to before my SOTA career started!

So this morning I packed my backpack and started my car, setting my destination to one of those “virgin” SOTA summits. I also brought my four-legged companion, named Zelda (a 1-year-old Shiranian), to see if she would be able to accompany me on a SOTA activation.

After driving for 1.5 hours, we parked the car and donned the backpack. It’s quite a bit heavier with two batteries, a Xiegu G90, and a 100W PA. The PA is a KL 203 P that is modded to have a small fan and is somewhat able to run 14MHz (not fully 100W though).

It started great with nice weather and a cool breeze to keep us from overheating. Zelda got to meet some cows for the first time in her life (they were quite scary according to her), and we had a chat with the local farmer.

Zelda’s first meeting with cows. The summit is in the background.

However, after about 20 minutes of walking, my four-legged companion started to feel the climb and hinted that it was time to turn around and go back to the car. Unfortunately, that was just a quarter of the way we needed to walk, and the climb had not even started for real yet. After some encouraging words and goodies, she reluctantly continued onward.

We continued for 40 more minutes before she just sat down and refused to move—regardless of encouragement and bribes. When we sat down, she climbed up into my lap and I understood that the activation was a dud and we had to cut the hike and return to the car.

Obviously I was not excited about this, but I don’t want to push my four-legged friend more than she is comfortable with either. And since this was her first longer hike, it was also kind of expected.

So I learned not to bring Zelda on my SOTA activations—at least not those that require more than an hour of walking. Hopefully the weather will hold next week and I can give this another go.

Side note: I also discovered that the HF propagation was horrible today due to solar flares and heavy northern lights activity, so I probably would have ended up with 0 QSOs anyway. So I guess, in a way, she did me a favor :)

The first leg of the hike followed a forest road. You can see the summit in the background.

The second leg was more of a path up the hill.

Here but no further. We turned around when we got halfway up.

Northern lights taken from the driveway of my house the night before.