Been a while since I have posted a SOTA post, and since my last one (Freel peak) I’ve actually knocked out a few different peaks and added three new associations (W7O, W4K, and W4V) and added the W6/CN region with Lassen Peak (was kind of a happy accident as part of a camping trip) . I have done 242 points this year, but what is funny is that i know there are others that have more.. (and we still have 6 weeks to go, and I still have a few more Rim Trail peaks to knock off.
Anyway for the sake of shortness I’ll summarize the highlights..
I went on a camping trip Halloween weekend with the intention of adding W7O, and doing some exploring up the 395 corridor. That was a fun trip, and got my first snow driving of the year heading up to the Crane Mountain (W7O/EC-001) fire tower. Phil (NS7P,) again apologies for not trying harder to pull you in…). One could really get lost on those forest service roads back there, and I will do a dedicated blog post to that so I can share the approach road info that I learned (which does not match very well some of the other trip reports on both Summit Post and SotaData). Plus that one was cool b/c that weekend I think we were still in the Geminid meteor shower, and for the hour that I watched and waited to doze off (at 8200′ elevation) I was seeing some 50-60 meteors per hour. It was an amazing light show. That same weekend while camping I ended up on Lassen Peak (added W6/CN); totally a happy accident.
In September I took a trip to TN to visit my dad and picked up W4K/EC-001 (Black Mountain) and W4V/GC-001 (High Knob) for my first two-fer in a day and those two associations. Man those drive up summits really can spoil you. The cool thing about W4K/EC-001 is I bumped into a fellow SOTA person on the summit. (I had chased him on Clingman’s Dome the day before; yah SOTA complete) DL6AP (Andreas) from Germany who was on a 6 week US SOTA tour. Very funny hearing your own callsign not OTA… He was also doing the W4V/GC-001 and W4K/EC-001 same day double activation..(we did them in reverse order). I had a feeling and should have checked my spots earlier in the day. we could have both totally SOTA completed each other for those two peaks.. That same day I ended up hanging out with a few SOTA folks from Kingsport TN. Damn you do not even need HF if you are near Kingsport. There is quite the SOTA community there in Kingsport. W4K/EC-001 is a challenge to activate with all those antennas, W4V was my first ever real pile up.. and because I was killing time waiting for a 1:1 with my boss, I opted to hang out and S2S chase some folks too.
Anyway, that’s a quick synopsis, I have enough notes and pictures from all these that I will probably do some individual blog posts, but wanted to put something online since it’d been a few weeks.
Thanks and -73 N6JFD
N6JFD's Sota Blog 