I think because the weather has been sssooo terrible over the past few weeks I was too optimistic about the conditions today - need to pay more attention to MWIS rather than general forecasts. I’d also not slept great either, so when it came to it I bottled taking the motorbike an hour to Binsey and decided to do Gummer’s How instead.
I’ve not had many activations where I’ve thought I’d rather have stayed at home but I got close today. Firstly had to turn around half way down the Newby Bridge road because there was an issue with a crane that was going to take a couple of hours to resolve (so I was told by a car going the other way, I’ve learnt to never ignore advice like this). When I got there, conditions were drizzle and very gusty at the summit.
My SOTABEAMS 10m compact travel pole was really bending to start with, to the point it almost made it horizontal, so I had to drop down another section to get it stable. Oh, then I realised I’d forgotten the microphone for the FT-817. This did however validate my decision recently about CW keys, which is that I should have one key per rig permanently ready to go, so the attached Palm Pico paddles saved the day. In that vein, I did manage to score one of these beauties this week:
Couldn’t raise anyone on 2m CW but had a good run on 20m and a couple on 40m, although I was suffering from summit brain and required several repeats. Then come pack up time I found that the bottom two sections of the mast had over-extended in the wind by about 10mm and no amount of persuasion would get them to part. In the end I managed to get them separated by forcing them against a tree, but the inner section now has some splitting at the bottom. I’m not having a lot of luck with these poles at the moment!
This will all be forgotten soon when spring finally arrives!
Regards, Mark. M5TEA.
p.s. apologies to Reg @2e0ldf if my alert had prompted you to ascend Binsey, hope you had a nicer time there than I did! My plan is still to activate the remaining LD SOTA fells, so I’ll be looking to get up there soon.