Shining Tor, G/SP-004 - 559m ASL - SJ 994 737 - OS Explorer OL24 - 2 SOTA points        

Getting one's rucksack, water, soup, clothes, boots, coat, batteries etc ready, even for some local activations, is time-consuming work. Doing it times three is exhausting stuff. At least Jimmy sorted out his and Liam's clothes which saved me a job, and also put the SOTAwatch Alerts on for me.

But the job was done, and I was flopped down at my PC in the shack, late in the evening, with the last can of Stella in the house, and looking forward to a bit of SOTA for the next day.  Five points would be a relative bumper haul for me these days! Jimmy would cop for seven. He was amused when putting on the Alerts that we were scheduled to do SP-013 at 1300 and SP-015 at 1500. I suggested that we get up at 0200 and do SP-004 at 0400, and have a rest in between. His amusement suddenly ended abruptly; I can't imagine why.

Well, we had a good day. The main objective was to see if Jimmy could activate on 40m using SSB, QRP and SPOTlite. The answer was yes, although it didn't work out on the third summit of the day. Dusk was approaching though, there were no gaps between the contest stations, and they themselves could no longer hear our QRP as the skip started to get longer. But considering that we wanted to test these working conditions in order to have a better chance of qualifying Kisdon G/NP-026 (and others with poor VHF take-off) the next time we go there, it was good to confirm that we could either nominate a frequency (or be spotted) on SOTAwatch via SPOTlite, or answer the contest stations if an event was on. This all worked fine before 4pm.

We kicked off with a cooked breakfast at the big Tesco in Macclesfield - bacon, scrambled egg, sausage, black pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, hash brown, beans and pot of tea. We then parked in the usual spot just short of the Cat & Fiddle pub on the A537 and walked to Shining Tor G/SP-004.

   

Although the temperature was rather mild (varying between 9 and 11 degrees), the winds were strong again all day, adding significant windchill. We were able to get comfortable in shelter. We found this huddled at the foot of a wall on Shining Tor. Unfortunately, the 40m dipole and fishing pole remained exposed to the conditions, and collapsed several times during the activation! This problem did not repeat itself on the two later summits, which are of course both a good 500 feet lower than this one.

I made a few contacts on 40m CW, and Jimmy some on SSB. We made S2S contacts with Luc ON6DSL/P and Klaus DF2GN/P, both on 40m SSB. After quite a long stop on summit, I sent the lads down with my car keys, and volunteered to pack everything away alone. When I returned to the car, Liam was inside it, but Jimmy wasn't. "Where is he?" I asked. Liam told me that he was "over there somewhere looking for a geocache". He returned, triumphantly, a couple of minutes later.

       

We now headed along the lanes via Bottom o'th' Oven, Forest Chapel, Wildboarclough, Wincle and Danebridge towards Gun G/SP-013.  Thanks to the following stations, all worked on 40m with 5 watts: