This activation was one of those days where I unexpectedly had a free evening, so I messaged a friend who has their Foundation license and asked if they wanted to do a “Rapid SOTA”. This was met by confusion as they expected that this was a specific kind of activation, perhaps like a “60 Minute POTA” which I’ve seen some operators do. However, it was literally just a short notice spare evening, I wanted to activate a summit and I wanted to do it quickly.
G/SP-012, or Easington Fell, was still on my list to do and was just over an hour away. We met at the parking spot on Slaidburn Road (SD 71884 48063), dismounted from our vehicles and headed North to the start of the footpath (SD 71773 48345). This was a shorter hike in that I typically like, at only 2 kilometres in, however my priority was completing the activation in as short an amount of time as possible. The hike in was a little wet underfoot but generally very easy, and essentially entirely flat.
The first challenge came when we reached the summit and I learned the meaning of “Flying Ant Day.” At the summit there is no trig point, just a very small cairn – or pile of rocks – which marks the highest point. However, it was absolutely covered in flying ants. It was difficult to concentrate with the shear amount of ants flying around, getting in your hair, and on more than one occasion – in my mouth. Thankfully the SOTA rule typically allow you to activate anywhere within 25 (vertical) meters of the summit. So we fell back towards the footpath, just away from the tree line and thankfully after a little scrambling we managed to find a peaceful spot.
My co-activator began setting up their HF antenna and I grabbed a handheld radio out (An Anytone 878UVII Plus with an RH-205 antenna) and began making contacts. I made my first contact at 18:25 UTC to G6JJI and then rapidly contacted M7MCG, G4JNN, and finally M7CQS at 18:31 UTC. All from the handheld, all on 5 watts. I switched off the handheld and at this point I began setting up my ICOM IC-705 to do some HF work and heard (from my co-activators Baofeng) a station shouting out for my callsign. It was M7APU checking if I’d made the four contacts required for the activation and to save the day if I was struggling! It was so great to have stations out there looking out for us on the summits and trying to help out. Thank you!
I freed up the VHF calling channel for the other activator to make their contacts and whilst I waited and tried to get a quick contact on HF. This took a long time and a lot of debugging and eventually I made the realisation that my coax was broken, it had been squashed by my Peli case and was damaged. The damage wasn’t immediately visible, but eventually I found a small pinch mark on the coax and realised what had happened. A quick swap to the spare coax and I grabbed a HF contact with F5PYI on 20m at 19:44. Followed by one final contact on VHF with G6MMS at 20:00. That’s 7 total QSOs and with my summit partner having completed their contacts, it was time to get off the fell.
Failures
I don’t feel there were any meaningful failures on this activation – although my primary coax was found to be broken on the summit, this highlights the principle of “two is one, one is none” regarding having a backup. In this case as I had a secondary capability and still managed to make the contact on 20m, I don’t consider this a failure. However, I had not considered the potential for apocalypse levels of flying ants at the summit, and have taken note to research some insect repellents.
Successes
The aim of this activation was to complete the activation as quickly as possible, and I achieved this. Additionally, my initial contacts were made on a handheld. Using the handheld wasn’t planned, it was just done on whim on the day, and I’m very happy that I made that decision. It was actually my first time using a handheld on a summit and it worked surprisingly well.