Kerloch
Back for more SOTA
After my first summit, I was keen to go again. I didn’t get much opportunity for a few weeks but then one Friday I was off work and it was a glorious day so it seemed like the perfect opportunity. The route in Sotlas was the one I took. There’s a small car park at the start of the route near Knockburn Loch - a favourite place for paddle boarding and other lake activities. The start is a dirt road that the loggers and farmers use and so an easy walk gently uphill.
Once you start getting into the forest part you turn off the road and onto a track. The weather had been quite wet and there was evidence of run off washing away a lot of the path up. It was like walking on a dry river bed!
The gradient picks up in the forest area and then you emerge around 400m up looking up to the summit and across to the south, where there’s a wind farm on the side of the hill. The walk from here continues up and round to the summit. I had blue skies and a bit of haze in the distance but great views all round.
This time I had a much lighter pack with me. I’d been lucky in find a used KX2, and it is considerably lighter than my G90 plus huge battery! I have it tucked into a little LowePro camera case and I printed a front cover to protect it whilst in transit. I was using the short random wire vertical as before. This is a 5.5m radiator, with two 4.25m counterpoises. They’re attached via bananaplugs to a BNC, then a short piece of coax with a common mode choke into the radio. I also had my Boafeng for 2m FM.
I got 3 on 2m FM from Aberdeen and shire, then setup on HF. Where the G90 can tune the antenna on 40m, the KX2 can’t - not without a helper transformer. So I went straight to 20m, where I managed another 10 contacts. The highlight being JW9DSA from Svalbard. I didn’t know where JW was at the time and he was a very strong signal, so I didn’t think much of it. He did keep saying “hello from the artic”, and thanking me for the SOTA activation. I sort of assumed it was Russian somewhere. When I got home I looked him up and saw where and what they were up to! He wasn’t on a summit at the time, just in the camp calling others. A good contact at around 1,500 miles, and makes the map look bigger!
I’d also tried out the tiny mic for the first time. I assumed it worked okay as no-one said anything untowards. I also had the audio repeat (I forget the proper term), so I could hear myself and it seemed fine to me also. It was back down and back home. I was hot by the time I got back as the weather was warm and it was sunny. Had a nice cup of tea at home, looked at the logs and then it was time to pick the kids up from school!
