Creag Ghiubhais
Difficult conditions
This was another early morning summit before work. A little one pointer that has a reputation of being a painful hill to climb given the terrain. It rarely activated, probably for that reason, and is on my list of GM/ES summits to activate. Fraser had just been up it the week before, after being the last person to activate it back in 2022! He said he found a better route up, and shared the path with me.
I followed his gps tracks and the route was generally fine. There’s rarely a path and it’s a bit more of an adventure through trees and heather. I thought it was quite fun. Sometimes following a path can be a little boring. I was soon at the top and got setup on HF. Fraser wanted to chase on 2m, for his complete, but was finding a better location.
The HF bands were absolutely terrible. A big storm, G4 (out of 5) had occurred the night before and conditions were rough. I called on HF for about 15 minutes getting nothing until Fraser said he was ready on 2m. He gave me three callsigns, just in case things were that bad. I returned to HF and was determined to get the required four contacts but with different people. On 40m a couple of European stations came back, with reasonable signal reports. I tried chasing another SOTA activator in Germany. We almost made a contact on 40m but it was just too difficult with heavy fading. I heard him call me but only part of my callsign and then nothing. I tried him again on 20m but it was no use. Eventually I got another on 40m after trying all the bands and with 7 QSOs with 5 people I decided that was enough and I had to get off to work anyway.
