Hill of Fare & Benaquhallie

Hill of Fare

Another nice day and another chance for some activiations. After my trip to Strathfinella and not doing Garvock on the same day, I was determined to try for two in one day today. So I was more prepared with lunch and routes this time.

First was Hill of Fare. There's a car park called Back of Hill of Fare on the B993 where there's space for 5-10 cars by the side of a log store. I then followed the path up from there. A couple of new looking fences have been installed but there are some nice gates. They had very high handles, which I thought was strange, but then someone pointed out they're for horse riders.

Probably took around 50-60 minutes to reach the top. It's quite a wide opening at the top, with some small pools of water.

I didn't want to hang about long, so 2M FM got me 3 contacts and then I switched to 70cm to activate the summit. Three people, 4 callsigns and 2 bands in about 10 minutes! Time to go to the next one, and hopefully arrive in time to catch Chris, MM7RVP, going up Cairn-mon-earn for a summit to summit contact.

Benaquhallie

After Hill of Fare, I drove across to Benaquhallie, and parked by the side of an old farm building. There's not really much space to park, and I think the house is still occupied so you can't block the road, but maybe two cars could park there.

The route up is fairly easy going, you walk east in front and around the summit before turning back on yourself and climbing up to the top. There's a trig point where the summit marker is but then down the hill a little, along that path, is the cairn.

I started with 2m at the trig point and managed 3, and then another 3 on 70cm. Meanwhile Chris, MM7RVP, was up Cairn-mon-earn and calling CQ on 2m as well. The four of us could hear him but he seemed to struggle to recieve. Like I did, there's quite a bit of QRM from the communications towers there and I think his handheld was getting overloaded.

I setup the Slim G to see if that would help get through the Chris, but no luck again. So I took it down and setup HF. I did manage to get Chris on both 40m and 20m, for our summit to summit. I then called on 20m and ended up with another 11 EU contacts, including a summit to summit in Switzerland.

I was pleased to manage two summits in one day. I had to be back for school pickup so timing wise it worked out quite well. There was a 1:20 gap between my last contact on Hill of Fare and my first on Benaquhallie, so these pair are a good combo, espeically if you can activate on VHF/UHF!

Mike, 2M0WMA, also taught us all, over the air, how to pronounce Benaquhallie. It's something like "ben-a-whallie", but with some good accent on the Wh. I think I was the only whallie that day.