This years’ winter tour is almost an exact copy of last years’ tour,
except for the last summit, read on …
I had planned to take my friend Geert, ON5GL on this tour, to introduce
him to SOTA. He’s already a seasoned POTA activator and an excellent CW operator,
so adding SOTA would have been easy.
But the weather predictions were not good for the weekend of March 2 & 3,
so we had to postpone to the last possible weekend to get the winter bonus points,
March 9 & 10. Alas, Geert was not free that weekend, so I set off alone,
like I have done many times before.
Three of the summits on this tour were activated by me for TENTH time !
(ON/ON-001, -010 and -011)
I followed the same route as last year, and on the first day I activated these summits:
ON/ON-001 (Signal de Botrange)
ON/ON-009 (Iverst)
ON/ON-011 (Sur Clair Fa)
ON/ON-013 (Bois de Hodinfosse)
ON/ON-010 (Baraque Fraiture)
On day 2 :
ON/ON-004 (Bois de Hazeille)
ON/ON-006 (La Croix Scaille)
ON/ON-030 (Terril de l'Hougarde (ouest)), which was a new summit for me. With this one, I have again activated all Belgian summits, and have all of them them complete as
well.
So here we go, on to the first summit …
Day 1
ON/ON-001 (Signal de
Botrange)
The day started at the unholy time of 05:10 local, when I left my home
town of Ostend. I had my breakfast along the road, and I arrived at the first summit at
08:20. Using my KX3 Go Box, I was QRV in under 4 minutes, just put up the
antenna, connect and GO !
And surprise, with temperatures around 10°C , the ground was not frozen,
so I could actually put a pin in the ground for my fishing pole. I used the long wire to start off with some 80m QSO’s.
Then followed two large pile-ups on 20m CW and 40m SSB.
In total I made 64 QSO’s in exactly 1 hour, great ! This included 2 S2S.
ON/ON-009 (Iverst)
I went to my ususal parking spot, but surprise again here : a large part
of the forest had been cleared !
I felt a little naked, setting up against …
well, just some open space.
36 QSO’s here, with 3 S2S.
ON/ON-011 (Sur Clair
Fa)
For this
one, I wanted to try a new approach via the village of Logbiermé. I wanted to
park here : 50.342190, 5.963991, then walk some 700m to this position 50.330823,
5.977015, which is North of the trig point and in the activation zone.
But I got
in trouble with my navigation system, coming from the East, it sent me into a small farm road, then
some forest roads which became more and more difficult to drive … only to be stopped by a forbidden sign after some time. Why
they didn’t put that sign at the start of that road I don’t know, but I had to
return, and went to my regular parking spot at 50.319998, 5.972385, also along
a forest road near the horse riding school of Mont-le-Soie.
I'll do my homework a little better next year and try again ... hi.
Last year the last stretch of that forest road was very muddy, so I wanted to
avoid that (ask Paul M0PLA why … see his report here : https://m0pla.blogspot.com/2019/07/sota-european-tour-2019-day-1.html )
But this
time, it didn’t look that bad (I think), and I managed to drive through the few wet
patches without problems.
First I had my lunch, sitting in the sun near my car, but that was about the last sun I saw that day ...
After lunch, a short
walk to a clearing in the forest which is in the AZ, and I was on the air …
28 QSO’s,
and 6 S2S made this a very good activation.
ON/ON-013 (Bois de
Hodinfosse)
No problems here, except for a cold wind blowing up the slope at my
regular operating spot.
35 QSO’s here, with 7 S2S.
The
clouds became more and more threatening .. so it was time to go the last summit
of the day …
ON/ON-010 (Baraque
Fraiture)
I set up on the deserted parking area. In half an hour I made exactly 30 QSO’s, which included 4 S2S.
Then it started raining, so I quickly
packed all my stuff and drove to a restaurant near my AirBnb in St-Ode, had a
good meal … and filled up the empty spaces with a nice dessert well earned , hi.
Day 2
ON/ON-004 (Bois de
Hazeille)
I described my new operating spot last year, so I went the same route.
This day was also the UBA Spring Contest 2m phone/CW, so I took also another Go Box I made, containing an IC-705, a Palm Mini paddle and the microphone. It has a voltmeter, fixed connections for antenna, microphone and headphones, and an additional switched external speaker, since when you plug in a headphone connector, it cuts off the internal speaker.
The voltmeter is for use of my 4-cell Li-Ion external battery, which ensures I will get 10 Watts out of the IC-705. When fed with only 12V , it has only 8 Watts. I will make a more detailed description of what I did, later on my blog.I used a 4-element log-periodic (by Anjo Antennas) for VHF/UHF. I set up the antenna on the 6m mast, it's a bit difficult to see in above picture, so follow the BIG arrow , hi.
All in all, it was not worth the trouble, I made only 2 QSO’s on 2m SSB, and
lost over 30 minutes in doing so.
So I quickly switched back to the KX3 and the random wire, and made 38
more QSO’s in another 30 minutes !
Only 1 S2S on this one, but that was enough to catch the points for my and the
other summit.
ON/ON-006 (La Croix
Scaille)
Along the road to the Tour du Millénaire, also a lot of forest had been
cleared. Strange to have a view in the distance for a change … sorry, forgot to take a picture.
I set up at my usual spot near the “Ferme Jacob”, and had a nice activation. In 40 minutes I made 34 chasers happy, and also catched 5 other summits.
ON/ON-030 (Terril de l'Hougarde (ouest))
I had postponed activating this summit because it’s not in the safest
area of Belgium … and it’s a black slag heap full of thorn bushes … so it’s
not the most pleasant experience.
But since it was the only summit I hadn’t activated yet, and I had
already chased it, I had to go at least once right ?
I parked at the position indicated by Peter, ON4UP on the summits page :
50.393966, 4.301502. There is place for just one car near the electricity pylon.
From there it is only a short walk ‘around the corner’, to get access to the
short but steep ascent to the summit. One can cross the field, but it is very
uneven terrain, so I chose to walk around the field and follow the path between
the field and the vegetation. I recorded my track, you can download it from the SMP or from SOTL.as
The climb was rather dangerous, the center of the path was full of
leaves, which made the whole thing a bit slippery. Good shoes and a walking
stick are no luxury !
At the top, the view is nice, but there is not much space for antenna’s.
I started with my 10m antenna: 5m wire on the 5.5m pole and a little Fuchs tuner.
All the trouble was quickly forgotten when my first callers in CW were no
other than … Gary W0MNA and Martha W0ERI, that felt so great !
Some more DX followed, with another nice surprise : TI5JON from Costa Rica !
All with only 12 Watts and 5 meters of wire … incredible.
After 10 QSO’s on 10m , no more calls … so what to do?
My little “Fuchs tuner” can only tune 10m or 20m.
I did have the 10m wire in my backpack, but there was no space nor time to put it up like
it should be … the clouds were showing that it would start to rain soon …
So I quickly draped the wire over some branches, and the wire got stuck
somewhere halfway … and I ended up with a kind of “double inverted vee” (I
enhanced the picture to show the wire).
The SWR was ok, and it must have worked, I made another 8 QSO’s on 20m
SSB in just 4 minutes.
Someone wrote on the SOTA Reflector that you don't need a pole (but I can't find it back right now) ... I'm beginning to believe him, hi.Alas no S2S on this one … but one can’t have it all , right ?
At the end, a light drizzle came up … time to pack up and go home …
So far for my winter tour 2024 … I hope to do it again next year !
73,
Luc ON7DQ
