Scotch and SOTA
Scotch and SOTA
A week of chasing N4EX/p & WA2USA/p
Last night I raised a “wee dram” of “The Famous Grouse” to celebrate a week of “chasing” Dennis, WA2USA/p and Rich, N4EX/p who have been activating SOTA summits in North Carolina every day for the past week.
I first noticed their entry in the Upcoming Activations section of the Sotawatch website on September 29th and thought it might be fun to try to work them. NC is too far away for 40m propagation from Ottawa during the daytime but as it turns out 20m seem to work well.
I got both of them on September 29th at W4/WM-001, Clingman’s Dome which is on the border of NC and TN.
Excited by my success I scanned the “Upcoming Activations” list the next day and there they were again planning to operate from Waterrock Knob. This scenario repeated itself over and over again. Soon I realized that a week had gone by and I had managed to work at least one of them every day, with the exception of Saturday October 1st . The propagation on 20m on Saturday was very poor and despite my best efforts a QSO just wasn’t going to happen.
Initially I had no idea who these guys were, but I soon began to visualize them as “the Energizer Bunnies” of W4-SOTA ... they just kept going and going and going ....
It was an interesting experiment to see how consistent mid-day propagation was into NC from Ottawa over the span of a week. Signal reports ranged from RST 449 to 579 and in spite of low power being used at both ends we were able to QSO 6 out of 7 days. I never ran my K2 at more than 10 watts into my 4BTV vertical and they were both QRP.
In addition to learning a lot more about the mountains of North Carolina and making a couple of new friends on the air, this experience has piqued my interest in Summits on the Air. Eric ,VA3AMX and I are hoping to activate McKinstry Peak VE2/OU-003 in Gatineau Park on October 22. This will be my first SOTA activation.
Dennis, Rich ... thanks again for the fun week !
. .
P.S. For more info on Summits on the Air see the SOTA Website.
Thursday, October 6, 2011