This was my second attempt to activate Storkluken (LA/ST-327), after my four-legged friend couldn’t make it all the way up on our first try. This time, I went alone, with a 4.5 km hike to the summit after a 1.5-hour drive.

The weather started out beautifully—clear blue skies and a brisk 4°C. I was in high spirits as I parked my car and stepped into the sunshine. But while packing my gear, I realized I’d forgotten my windbreaker jacket! Even though the weather was pleasant at that moment, I knew worse conditions were on the way. Still, I wasn’t ready to give up, so I threw an extra blanket from the car into my backpack and set off.

The hike began on a gravel road leading up to a cabin. As I walked along this forest road, more and more snow gathered on both sides. It wasn’t a heavy snowfall, but it was evident that the trees and bushes weren’t ready for snow so early. Colorful autumn leaves mixed with the white snow made for a beautiful sight. 

Further up, the gravel road gave way to a hiking path, and the snow thickened with each step. The trail was just as steep as I remembered, but now with a colder bite to the air. Despite that, I worked up quite a sweat, and my heart rate was going strong.

After about 45 minutes, I reached the spot where we had turned around last time. I rewarded myself with an energy bar and refilled my water bottle from a nearby stream. Then it was time to keep moving—up, up, up, into the snowy white rocks.

I kept a close eye on my map, feeling a sneaky suspicion that the summit might be less accessible than I’d originally thought. It looked like there were two summits—one was much easier to reach, but the other appeared taller and very steep. I didn’t want to get to the end of the path only to realize I couldn’t reach the true summit. But there was only one way to find out, and that was to keep putting one foot in front of the other. So I did, for another 45 minutes.

Soon enough, the wind started to affect me. My fleece sweater did nothing to block it, and despite working up a sweat, the cold wind cooled me down fast. Thankfully, I found the ruins of an abandoned cabin, whose walls provided just enough shelter for me to put on all my remaining clothes. I also used the blanket as a makeshift cape, and at that moment, I felt a bit like a member of the Fellowship of the Ring. However, I was no Legolas, that’s for sure.

The path seemed to go between the two summits, up a pass. My mood lifted when I realized I’d likely be able to reach the highest point without needing to climb any icy rocks. Just as I posted my second YouTube short, I noticed a yellow-painted cairn marking the summit! The climb wasn’t steep at all, and soon I found myself at the highest point in the area. I cross-checked with my GPS—confirmed, I was there! It was time to set up the radio and antenna and get started.

I unpacked my gear and began setting everything up. As I did, I noticed dark clouds approaching, and I knew I had limited time before I needed to start my descent to avoid getting caught in a snowstorm without my windbreaker. With renewed motivation, I worked quickly, but in my haste, I managed to tangle my counterpoise wires, which I had to sort out while my fingers went numb.

I checked the weather forecast—it was now -3°C. I positioned my backpack behind the cairn to get some protection from the icy wind. Then I tuned the antenna with my Xiegu G90 and hooked the power amplifier up to its batteries.

At that point, I realized I’d not only forgotten my windbreaker but also my pencil and paper! Fortunately, I had an app on my phone called HAMRS that I wanted to test, so that would have to do.

After a quick self-spot on SOTA Watch, I found myself managing a pileup. The app worked well, even verifying callsigns with QRZ.com, which helped ensure accuracy. The biggest challenge was typing on the on-screen keyboard with numb fingers.

Things went fairly smoothly, though I fumbled a bit due to the growing stress of those dark clouds moving in. Thankfully, everyone was patient and helped me through.

Unfortunately, I had to stop even though many people were still calling. I didn’t feel it was safe to continue, as I wanted to get off the summit before visibility dropped and conditions worsened. It felt rude to cut things short, but safety had to be the priority.

The descent went smoothly—I only slipped once, thankfully onto a patch without any sharp rocks. It took me about an hour and a half to get back to my car. Though going downhill is easier, it’s still no small feat and takes quite a bit of energy.

Now, I’m back in my warm house, writing this up after claiming another first activator badge and earning the 1 km ascent badge, as the summit was 1,100 meters tall.

Thanks for reading, and QSO you later! 73

Again I spent a lot of time on the SOTLAS Map and been eyeing the summits that have zero activations. It happened that my family’s cabin is in an area that have quite few of those and I decided to get one of those this weekend while we were there. So off I went to Kopparen (LA/ST-217)

The weather was so so with a temperature of 8C and clouds, but that is also a perfect hiking weather for me. I packed my backpack and if I was ot estimate the weight it was about 10kg. At some point in time I will make a post detailing what I bring along on these longer activations, but for now a short list will have to do:

– My Xiegu G90 with a 8000mAh LiPo battery

– PAC-12 7MHz-50MHz antenna with a 5.6m whip antenna

– KL 203 P portable PA that is modified to work on 20m and a 12V motorbike starter battery

– Rite in the Rain top spiral notebook and a Rite in the Rain Work Ready Mechanical Pencil

– Various cables, tools and other things to make the trip more comfortable

The hike up to the summit follows a 4.5km gravel road all the way up. There is an alternative route on the other side of the summit that is shorter, but a lot steeper and is a path and not a road. No vehicles are allowed on the gravel road and it is quite steep after the first kilometer. The first leg of the road goes through a forested area with a few cabins along the road. After a bit the incline started and the forest started to diminish.

It was then I remembered I forgot to bring anything bu a 0.5l soda bottle, but luckily about half way up there was a small stream where I could refill it. I prefer to bring a lot more than 0.5l of drink when hiking – but turning around was not an option for me.

After a half way break where I filled up the reserves with an energy bar, the road became even more steep and my heart rate spiked at 150 at times. Great cardio exercise for sure. There were a few other people going up and down, but not everyone were as red faced as me…

On the top of the summit there are a huge radio tower operated by one of the national telecom companies and a not-so-secret military radar installation. I sat up my vertical antenna and its counterpoise wires and got it adjusted to 20m. I love that it gets a SWR of 1.0 without using the G90 tuner – which in turn means I can use my little PA without any SWR issues. I did a test call with a person from the Netherlands (unfortunately I forgot to note the callsign). Then I tried to reach some fellow Norwegians that I was chatting with on Discord, but seems like we were inside the skip distance so no contact possible there.

I self-spotted on SOTA Watch and seconds later I had a pileup to manage. However, this round I did not have the luxury of getting help from Stian [LB5SH](https://lb5sh.no/) and his 9 years of experience running multiple DXpeditions and thousands of QSOs. So that meant it was all up to me!

I must admit it is both exciting and frightening to have 5-10 people call you at the same time. Exiting bit is that everything is working and I am able to reach out to people and get the activation in the logbook. The scary part is that I want people to have a good impression of me, and have a good experience chasing my activations so they will come back later. Luckily I feel that most HAMs out there are very patient and understands that someone are new to the hobby and need a bit more time to get things sorted and noted. Usually it takes me a couple of tries to get their callsign correct. Especially if their callsign does not follow the usual 2 letters, 1 number, 2-3 letters format. I am also not very familiar with the country suffixes and that sometimes gets me a bit confused. However, as many other things in life, this will only improve with time.

After an hour or so the QSO intervals veined and my hands were quite cold. At some point it started to rain as well, so I had to improvise a some cover for the radio and the PA. It would be great if I could dome up with some kind of mini tent or shelter that I can setup that does not weigh too much. But that is on the wishlist for future activations. Anyways, I decided to pack my stuff and return from the summit. I got in a couple more QSOs while packing and the end result was 31 QSOs in about one hour. I am very happy with that.

I also got a summit to summit activation and this is something I must remember to chase when I am setup. I need to dedicate some time at the end of the activation to look at the spots and try to make some summit to summit QSOs.

The hike down went fairly smooth even though my legs felt the number of steps accumulated though the 9km walk.

Thanks for reading and CQ later!

After the not so successful 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 tasty 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 changing 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.

For my second SOTA activation I decided to try something new. Liaåsen, LA/ST-011 is a small hill just outside Trondheim, Norway with a transmitter mast on top. It’s a popular location for hiking and quite popular with SOTA hams. I have been there before, but for other reasons than SOTA. My previous activation I used a PAC-12 7MHz-50MHz antenna from Aliexpress and it worked okay, but it was quite narrow banded and I wanted to remedy that. In my box of radio stuff I had a 5.6m whip antenna that would be the perfect length for 20m. Since its segmented it would also allow me to easily do 17m and 10m. Very fortunately there was a bench we could install ourselves and the equipment on.

After adjusting the length using my trust NanoVNA the Xiegu G90 from Radioddity I did not even need tune antenna as the SWR was 1.0 across all of the 20m band! I was very pleased with that. That means I probably dont need to bring all of the PAC-12 kit with me unless I want to so 40m. I also started on a 3D-printed base for the antenna using some hardware from the local hardware store – but that will have to wait for another day.

Then we let the action begin, and on the very first CQ call I got a QSO even before I spotted myself on SOTA watch! DJ1HAM was my contact and we had a short but nice QSO on 20m SSB. Then the contacts started pouring in and since I am very new at this I got som help from Stian LB5SH to decipher and note down the call signs. This is definitely something I need to work on improving, but it will come with time and practice. After 30 minutes I had 26 QSOs in my log and Stian asked if he could have little go at the radio. Obiviously it would only be a couple of minutes since it started getting dark and we had to return from the summit soon. Obviously.

However, he also started to get pileups and the he got hooked! It was really fun and a great learning experience to watch a much more experienced operator work the radio. After 15 minutes we took a short break and hooked a linear amplifier into the signal path to see how that would work. We did not have a power meter so we are not sure how many watts it was transmitting on, but somewhere between 50 and 70 is my guess. This little amplifier helped us reach even further and combined with the greyline even more pileup happened and Stian was working stations like a pro! Half an hour later he had a log of 36(!) QSOs! It was then time to call it as it was getting quite dark, and we had to leave quite a few still calling for us. Sorry about that, but safety first!

Happily we returned without too many challenges and we are ready for the next SOTA adventure!