ON7DQ Friedrichshafen 2022 - Day 8

Two summits and a museum ...

On the sunday after the fair, I wanted to activate the two nearby and easy summits, Höchsten and Gehrenberg. The weather promised to be very hot again, so we started early morning at the first summit.

DM/BW-854, Höchsten - 838m, 8 Points

This is a drive up summit, since the main road passes over it. Parking position is 47.819749, 9.402346. It's a very short walk to the bandstand on the summit, from where you have a nice view over the area. 

I went around the bandstand to find a place in the shade, and already saw another ham setting up his antenna. It was well known SOTA activator Marcel DM3FAM. 

We agreed on what bands to use, to reduce the chance of interference.

I used the long endfed and operated CW on 60m and 30m, while Marcel operated on 40m.
I had a nice run of 25 QSO's, including 6 S2S contacts, NICE!
Of course, one of those S2S was with the nearby summit of Gehrenberg, which is only 5 km away, line of sight. During the days of the fair, there are activators on these summits almost all day, and often several at the same time.

A while later, Marcel had finished his activation and came by for a short talk.

The summit of Höchsten is quite an interesting place, all around the walkways are displays of texts in German and Schwäbisch (Swabian), one of the local dialects.

See Wikipedia for some info here.
I don't think that Google Translate will be of any use to read the "Schwäbisch" ... but if you know some German, the texts are rather funny. 

Now my YL found nothing better to do than take my QR-code pancarte and hang it from one of the statues , hi.

Another property of this summit : it seems to attract the most unusual misunderstandings!

If you have followed my blog for some time, you may remember I had a funny encounter with Matt, OE6FEG on this very summit in 2019. Read that story here.

At some point, my YL was walking somewhere around the summit, and suddenly she saw the back of a man with a backpack and a fishing pole walking along the track. 

She thought I had already packed up and was leaving, so she shouted "Hey what are you doing? Where are you going ?"

She probably thought I was going  to leave her behind on the summit.
The mystery person turned around and said something like "Excuse me, did you say something ?"

Hahaha, of course I hadn't packed up yet, it was Martin, HB9GVW, who was looking for a shaded spot to set up his station. Sorry for the mix-up Martin !

Shortly after, Martin came to visit me, and we had a nice chat.

Now judge for yourself the similarities or the differences between me and Martin ;-)

I let Martin do his thing, and now I packed up for real, hi, and we moved to the next summit

DM/BW-348, Gehrenberg - 754m, 8 Points

Normally, it is forbidden to drive the forest track to the summit, but I couldn't find any forbidden sign (maybe it was overgrown ?), so I continued driving to this parking spot 47.742086, 9.423339. From there it is only 50m to the summit.

I kept the activation short, made 17 QSO's which still included 5 S2S contacts. One of those S2S was now Höchsten, which I had activated just a while before.

Then it was time to go to the city of Tettnang, to visit the old town and the Elektronik Museum.

I had been in the museum before, see some other pictures from my previous visit here.

And this is the website of the museum (in German only): Elektronik Museum

The nice City Hall

After that visit, we called it a day ...

Continue reading ... go to DAY 9

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Go back to overview HERE