Third SOTA Activation - Solemsvåttan (LA/ST-012)

After the not so successfull but half way there trip this weekend I still had not scratched my SOTA itch for the week. Looking at the map my eyes were drawn to another local hill that should be rather easy to climb and get an activation in the pocket. Today it was Solesmvåttan, LA/ST-012 that was on the menu. Its not as tatsy as the other summits with its single point, but one is better than none.

I dialed in my batphone and, yet again, summoned Stian (LB5SH) to join me as a two-legged companion.

In my backpack I packed my trusty Xiegu G90 powered by a 8000mAh LiPo, KL 203 P portable PA powered by a motorbike start battery and my favorite antenna combination of a PAC-12 7MHz-50MHz antenna with a 5.6m whip antenna. The SWR of the antenna is 1.0 on 14mHz and after chaning the patch cable between the G90 and the PA we got that to 1.0 also. SWR between the radio and PA was previously above 2 and it turned out it was a bad cable. Lesson learned; don't trust your cables.

Stian went first and even before I managed to add a self spot on Sota Watch QSOs started puring in! We took turns on running the radio for about an hour and we ended up with 74 QSOs combined between the two of us. Stian got most as I still struggle with managing the pileup and getting the callsigns correcly at first try - hopefully that will improve with time and experience.

We packed our gear and returned from the hill in order to try to catch the lcoal soccer match (result 1-1, by the way. Not great...)

Now I am back at staring at the sota map and plan out my next activations before the snow and winter will add to the challenges.

It was more of a climb that I thought it would be.

We got ourselves installed on some stone slabs and started our broadcast.