On Sunday April 3rd my friend Paul, SV2HRT and I activated our first SOTA summit, SV/MC-033, Katsika at 643 m / 2110 ft. ASL We started from what looked like an easily accessible summit close by to start to get a feel for what we should expect on harder summits, as we do plan on continuing to activate more summits The access road was in a terrible state so we hiked about 1km to the peak. On this summit there is a radio tower (GSM mobile?) which must have been experiencing a power cut as the generator was on.
Paul at the survey post, radio tower is just behind him
Although we brought along my Budipole antenna, we used a wire dipole antenna cut for 20m in an inverted V configuration. The RXTX used was my recently built SDR-Cube. At the time I thought the Cube was putting out 1W, but I later figured out that I made a miscalculation and the real output power was 250mW. 7 contacts where made on 20m CW unfortunately we did not manage to get the required 4 contacts with Paul's callsign SV2HRT. The time was getting late in the afternoon and it was windy and cold! We where not adequately prepared - A lesson for the next outing!
Paul, SV2HRT operating the SDR-Cube
Peter, SV0XAW at the summit survey column
As it turned out everything we used in this activation was homebrew, rxtx, antenna, key. There is something very satisfying when operating with all your homebrew gear, especially in the field on the top of a mountain.
We will try to activate SV/MC-057 on Sunday 17th April. See you from the summit.
