I’ve had Jubilee Tower on my list to activate for a little while; It’s a great spot for a little radio work – in fact I’ve had a couple of contacts us there already, before I knew it was a POTA location. So this Saturday after we finished our errands in town we decided to head up and activate it. It was a little impromptu, but there’s always a radio in the truck. On previous visits to the site it’s always been pretty quiet – this time however, there was snow on the ground so it was absolutely packed with people up there to go sledging!
Nonetheless, I’d recently received a SOTABeams Tactical Mini and Bandhopper II and was determined to try them out. Whilst I really got this antenna set up to use on SOTA activations, I did want to see if I could set it up in the truck. For that configuration I’d grabbed a flagpole mount which could attached to the bed of the truck to slot the Tactical Mini into. In short, this was a great setup. Really quick to deploy and it worked well.
You’d think that a 7 meter mast on the back of a pickup truck with two yellow wires running down to the ground would grab people’s curiosity – but you might be surprised that a lot of people somehow didn’t notice the setup. In one case someone practically walked into the antenna! Lesson learned – so I put a cone by the guy point to save people tripping over the wire (well…a bright blue Jerry can full of water, but close enough to a cone for the job).
I decided to activate on 40m with FT8 and it was going well at firs. I was 7 contacts in and then my callout alarm went off. I switched to my SAR radio and heard that the callout was within 3 miles of my location. I packed everything away as quickly as I could (the “make a pile on the floor and then throw it in the pickup bed” method) and got rolling. Sadly with only 7 contacts made, that’s not a valid activation.
After the MISPER was located and we were stood down, night had fallen and the snow started to come down again too. I could have potentially headed back to the Tower and grabbed a few contacts on the truck’s VHF radio, but I really just wanted to head home by that point. So we returned the next day with the first task being to deal with the mess of radio equipment that I’d thrown into the back. The snow was still on the ground for our second attempt, but after a lot of untangling and rewinding of the antenna we were good to go again.
I grabbed 13 contacts on 40m FT8 and then spun the dial to see if I could get a park-to-park or a SOTA chase. I grabbed one contact on 40m SSB and did manage to get the SOTA Chase, to M0NOM/P who was sitting in “not great conditions” earning those winter bonus points on the summit of Grisedale Pike. Park successfully activated, so it was time to pack up (neatly this time!) and head home.
