ON7DQ Trip to Friedrichshafen 2026

This is the report of my SOTA/POTA trip  to Friedrichshafen, the SOTA Dinner, the HAM RADIO fair and more ... 

If you stumbled upon my blog by accident, and don't know what SOTA means, read this first : What is SOTA?

A few acronyms you will encounter a lot in this report :
QSO    : a live contact between two radio amateurs
QTH    : the city where I live, or the place where I stay temporarily
XYL    : my wife (= eX Young Lady)
S2S      : summit-to-summit contact, between two radio amateurs that are on a different summits
P2P      : park-to-park, same as above, but between two radio amateurs in  different parks
AZ        : Activation Zone, the area that is no lower than 25m below the top of the mountain

Summary

This was my ninth visit to Friedrichshafen, and once more it was a "solo" trip.

My XYL had already used all of her vacation days for our trip to Tenerife (see this report).

This time, I was on the road for 11 days, I drove 2066 km, using 185€ of fuel.

I stayed in 6 different AirBnb's in the following places:

Bitche in France, then Bühl, Vorderfalkau, Friedrichshafen, Karlsruhe, and Föhren, all in  Germany.

The weather was very hot all the way, so I had to cancel a few summits, and replaced some summits, where the walk would be too exhausting, by easier drive-up summits.

I activated 17 SOTA summits, 26 POTA parks, and 1 bunker for BOTA (Bunkers On The Air).

Most of those were combined activations, only 1 park on the way home was a separate activation.

Some statistics for SOTA

This trip  added 128 activator points.

Also adding 496 chaser points, 608 summit-to-summit points, 10 new completes, 10 new activator uniques and 23 new chaser uniques. 

SOTA is not a conpetition, but it's a fun game between Peter, ON4UP, and myself, to be the number one in the S2S (summit-to-summit) ranking for Belgium. So I'm number one for the moment ... that is until Peter gets on the road again, at the time of writing , he's only 325 points behind, hi.

Equipment used

IC-705 in Go-Box + ATU-100 Autotuner

For this trip I took again the Icom IC-705 in it's Go-Box.
The SatRover setup for QO-100 didn't see much use last year, so I left it at home this time.

Antenna's :  9.15m random wire, with 9:1 UNUN and 4m counterpoise, and an Hourglass Antenna for 2m CW/SSB.
Coax 5m RG-58 (one each for HF and VHF).
ATU-100 autotuner (built from a kit).
Sony headphones, K6ARK mini microphone.
Palm Mini paddle (green edition).
6m fishing pole from Decathlon (missing the thinnest element, so really only 5.5m).
Cellphone with data plan and Ham2k Polo for logging/spotting.

Here is the list of activated summits followed by some statistics ... click on the Day x link to go directly to the report of the respective summits.

Day 1

• DM/RP-187, Wildenburger Kopf - 670m, 6 points (POTA DE-0022/0026/1015)
• DM/RP-158, Erbeskopf - 816m, 8 points  (POTA DE-0022/002 6/1015/0623/0858)

Day 2

• FL/VO-197, Hochkopf - 429m, 2 points
• FL/VO-191, Helfenstein - 363m, 2 points 

• FL/VO-048, Grand Wintersberg - 581m, 4 points

Day 3

• DM/BW-047, Badener Höhe - 1002m, 10 points (POTA DE-0007/0009/1016/0558)

• DM/BW-067, Brandenkopf - 945m, 10 points (POTA DE-0007/0009)

Day 4

• DM/BW-001, Feldberg - 1493m, 10 points (POTA DE-0004/0007)
• DM/BW-002, Herzogenhorn - 1415m, 10 points (POTA DE-0004/0007)

Day 5

• DM/BW-015, Hochfirst - 1190m, 10 points (POTA DE-0004)

• DM/BW-193, Schächer - 921m, 10 points (POTA DE-0004)

Day 6

• DM/BW-854, Höchsten - 838m, 8 Points
• The SOTA Dinner

Day 7

• The Ham Radio fair
• The SOTA Meeting
• The SOTA booth 

Day 8

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

Day 9 

• DM/BW-058, Burg - 975m, 10 points

• DM/BW-846, Burg Hohenzollern - 850m, 10 points (POTA DE-0948)

Day 10

• DM/RP-433, Rehberg - 564m, 4 points  (POTA DE-0016)
• DM/RP-171, Röster Kopf - 708m, 6 points (POTA DE-0022)

Day 11

• POTA BE-0513 Verdronken kinderenvallei Nature Reserve 

• and going home !

Copyright notice :

Driving maps are from https://aprs.fi/

QSO maps are from https://www.sotadata.org.uk/nl/map/

Summit track maps are from https://www.openstreetmap.org/ 

Continue reading this story ... go to DAY 1