A trip to Stockton on Tees to get my car serviced tied in well with my activation of TW-001. I borrowed the garages courtesy car, put a fivers worth of petrol in and within half an hour I was on my own climbing the Carr Ridge on The Cleveland Way up to Round Hill, TW-001. This is the highest point on The North Yorkshire Moors at 1490 feet above sea level. Shame it's 10 feet short of a winter bonus.

There is usually plenty of parking available at the Clay Bank car park GR NZ572036 in Bilsdale, accessible on the B1257 from either Helmsley or Stokesley. Watch out for fast motrocyclists on this road. It's known by bikers as "The Yorkshire TT" !

Directions:

Leave the carpark uphill but don't take the track into the forest as I did, or you will have to negotiate a dry stone wall with a large drop behind it. Instead, walk to the brow of the hill on the B1257 to where the actual Cleveland Way turns left going up and along the Carr Ridge. If you were to cross the road and go right at this point to climb White Hill (398m) you would pass the famous Wainstones rock formation and reach TW-002 Cringle Moor/Drake Howe after around 4 miles. I activated this one in November.

It's a steady climb along Carr Ridge to the trig point on Round Hill, an ascent of 700 feet over 2.2 miles, and for me a walking time of 50 minutes. I set the station up and ran into the first of the day's technical hitches. Murphy had accompanied me and decided to make the activation hard work. The feeder for the 2m SOTA Beam is attached via soldered crocodile clips and one decided to part company with the coax. In the bitter wind I didn't fancy trying to make the connection via a wire wrapped joint so I decided to abandon 2m and concentrate on HF.

So to HF it was. SOTA pole erect and secured to the trig point with 66 feet long inverted vee fed with 300 ohm twin at about 18 feet high fed into a 4:1 balun and LDG Z-100 Auto ATU. Murphy then reappeared as I discovered that the FT-817 was not seeing the external 12v 7Ah alarm battery....the internal battery was showing 9.7v at this stage so I ploughed on using 2.5 watts. After the QSOs on 5 MHz I thought I would try a full CPU reset to clear the fault. This left the internal iambic keyer stuck on 12 wpm...and the 400 Hz narrow CW filter uninstalled until I got in to the menu to change that as well. Gosh, 12 wpm seemed slow for a few QSOs until I fiddled in the menu and turned that up to a more sensible speed. Apologies to the few that suffered while I sent my very slow reports and details! I called CQ 5 times on 10106.0 MHz with no takers, so it's a good job you can always rely on 5 MHz for SSB and 7 MHz CW in the daytime hours. I apologise for the 10 minute delay in QSYing from 60m to 40m. It was at this point that 2 friendly gamekeepers appeared (I'm always meeting these types on the NY Moors activations!). We had a good chat and a few laughs too. I asked them if they were gamekeepers, to which they replied, "well we try to be" ! Much more friendly than the gamekeeper I encountered on Gisborough Moor (TW-003) in November who was pretty miserable and made me feel like I shouldn't have been where I was, activating SOTA.

So, in the end 27 QSOs were completed with excellent comms including two S2S contacts with John GW4BVE/P (NW-034) and Fritz DL4FDM/P (HE-462). A total of 7 DXCC Countries in all worked, not bad on the internal battery and 2.5 watts. Some reports were 59/599! I judged the activation as a success and was active on the FNB-85 9.6v 1400mAh internal battery pack for a solid hour.

The fault with the FT-817 turned out to be a broken track on the circuit board adjacent to the 12 VDC input socket. It's a well known fault also experienced by Rob G4RQJ and other SOTA Activators. The break in the trace prevents the internal battery accepting the charger voltage or the rig taking power from an external source. I managed to repair this myself with a small soldering iron. It's a bit risky due to possible heat damage to the surface mount components close by. Thanks go to Rob for pointing out this very common fault via the SOTA Reflector.

Where do we go next? Well, a holiday overseas is on the agenda but when we get back TW-005 will be the next one, before I activate more summits in the Southern Pennines and elsewhere.

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On 13th April 2006 I returned to re-activate TW-001 on 2m. I was accompanied by a non-radio companion so to save time I used my FT-817 and rubber duck. The activation resulted in 5 QSO's including a summit to summit QSO, with the following stations:

Philip Catterall G4OBK 14/04/06

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