Winter bonus tour .. and infecting a friend with “the virus”
Rob, ON4ROB is a member of my local radio club in Ostend, Belgium.
When staying on Lanzarote (EA8/LA), on two occasions, he had already done a few SOTA activations, which got him started with 2 activator points.
This winter, he went out on his own to do one summit with bonus points (ON/ON-010 Baraque Fraiture), bringing him to 13 points.
Seeing his slow progress 
, I thought “how can this go a bit quicker?”, so I invited Rob to do a two day tour of all ON summits with winter bonus points. And he accepted !
I booked a nice apartment on AirBnb and started packing.
DAY 1
On february 27, on a calm sunday morning, we set off at 06:00 local time, having a ‘brrrr cold’ breakfast (but with HOT coffee) along the way.
WX was cold but sunny (temp -1 °C). We set up seperate stations, some 100m apart. I was using my ‘long’ random endfed (21.3m) with 9:1 unun. Rig KX3 at 15W.
Rob used his FT817 at 5W, and a resonant endfed for 20m. I operated on 80m SSB, then 60m and 40m CW, to reduce the chance of interference to Rob’s station.
The sun in my back helped a little, but the cold wind did not do much good.
After this one, we went to ON/ON-009 Iverst, ON/ON-013 Sur Clair Fa, where we used only
one station, taking the mike in turns. We kept it short there, so not much to tell.
On the last summit of our first day, ON/ON-013 Bois de Hodinfosse, we set up seperate stations again. We had a nice operating spot in the sun, with a nice view over the valley in front of us. We stayed more than one and a half hour on the summit.
Difficult to see in the picture, but Rob was sitting under the yellow arrow, his fishing pole is seen to the left in the open field.
After qualifying all four summits (and me making a total of 123 QSO’s) we arrived in our BnB in Vielsalm at exactly 18:00 local time. First part of the mission accomplished !
DAY 2
Leaving our BnB at 09:00, I did a quick activation of ON/ON-010 Baraque Fraiture, while Rob tried to make a few QSO’s on 2m SSB, but no luck there.
Then we went to the nice spot behind the radar tower at ON/ON-004 Bois de Hazeille.
We set up my station only, and Rob made enough QSO’s to qualify, after which I had a nice pile up on 40m SSB, and made a few QSO’s on several other bands as well, 54 QSO’s in total, a nice catch.
Then it was time for our last summit, ON/ON-006 La Croix Scaille.
First we climbed the ‘Tour du Millénaire’.
Rob had visited this tower before, not knowing that it was also on a SOTA summit !
Rob tried his portable DMR rig, without luck. Then moving to 2m FM, we had just one contact with Jean-Luc ON4LS in Namur, at a distance of 60 km.
Jean-Luc sent us some pictures of the 70 cm repeater in that tower, and a nice view of the antenna and the solar panels, which a regular visitor can not see (unless you have a drone, hi).
Then it was time to go back to ground level for some HF work … I logged 43 more QSO’s, a mix of SSB and CW.
One of those QSO’s was a S2S with Guru, EA2IF (SK). Little did I know that it would be our last QSO.
R.I.P. my friend Guru, glad to have you in my log on the last day that you were out on a summit …
The way home was not so succesful as our activations, we had a lot of traffic jams and detours, so it took us 4 hours to get back to our home town Ostend.
But I had helped Rob to get to a nice score of 73 points, so I was very satisfied!
And my log showed 244 QSO’s in total, so I hope I made many chasers hapy as well.
I think I have now really infected Rob with the SOTA virus, because a few days after our trip , he was already out on his own again, to activate a one pointer, ON/ON-027 Pottelberg.
And in a few months time, he will be back on Lanzarote, so look out for EA8/ON4ROB.
73 and see you on another activation !
Luc ON7DQ and Rob ON4ROB
