In this review I’ll be sharing my impressions of the AnyTone AT-D878UVII Plus. I’ve carried this radio every day for a little over six months now, so I feel like I’ve got a good idea for its capabilities. I’ve also completed four SOTA activations using only this radio – paired with a Diamond RH-205 antenna: …
For some reason, I’ve put off activating Longridge Fell for a while. I’ve often passed it and could have activated it but always gone elsewhere. I think the fact that it’s only small (350m) and has a short hike in (1.5km) pushed me to tick off other summits like Pendle Hill and Fair Snape Fell …
This weekend I completed four SOTA summits, saving the biggest for last. For Whernside, I hiked in from the roadhead at SD 763 793 up to the summit along the “Three Peaks Walk” (SD760816, SD755825, SD740823) making this hike about 13 km total with an ascent of about 445 meters. There are a couple of …
I originally planned to activate The Cloud on Saturday morning and then head off to the Peak Wildlife Park – however, plans quickly changed when I made contact with MW7MWZ who explained that Gun (G/SP-013) was practically around the corner and “about a 3 minute hike from the parking spot.” So unusually for me, here’s …
Read more “SOTA Activation: The Cloud and Gun – G/SP-015 and G/SP-013”
I planned an ambitious trip for this weekend, planning to activation four SOTA summits in three days. The hiking wasn’t too ambitious, but fitting in trips like this between my day job and the work I do with SAR can be tricky. The first summit planned was Shining Tor, and it turned out to be …
This week I needed to travel to Northern Ireland for work and so I planned to take my TX-500 HF radio with me, and my MC-750 antenna to allow me to activate a SOTA summit just outside of Belfast, where I would be working. I’d never flown with a setup quite like this previously, so …
In my last activation, partially due to the weather and partially due to time constraints, I did a very restricted activation. Relying on FT8 and activating from the front seat of the truck. So this time around, I did things differently. I wanted to activate exclusively using SSB, but I still wanted to perform the …
Whilst looking over the POTA map of parks, I noticed a relatively new park – it had only been in the scheme for about 8 months and as such had only been activated twice – so I put it on my TODO list to get to as soon as I had a spare couple of …
For this activation we parked at Nick of Pendle, however on the approach to the parking spot I heard another SOTA operator (G5AIB) call CQ from the top of Great Coum. I managed to grab the contact on the truck radio from a small layby and then we quickly relocated to a better spot to …
This article covers setting up the JS8Call for the ICOM IC-705, but if you’re completely new to JS8Call you might want to check out my Introduction to JS8Call article first, before digging into the configuration steps here. When you connect the radio to your laptop (or ruggedised tablet if you’re like me!), you should check the device …