We started the climb up to the activation of Winter Hill from the “Snack Shack” at SD 64878 13147. On the way up we took an indirect route, stopping by at the Two Lads point at SD 65545 13366 before making our way up to the actual activation zone. As Winter Hill has a very wide plateau at the top the zone is very large, giving a lot of opportunities to get out of the wind behind dry stone walls, or explore the masts before settling down to activate.
We found a nice spot out of the wind and set up to activate on VHF and HF. I activated first on VHF making contact with G3ZIK at 11:08 UTC before quickly contacting M3XBP, G8NNL, and completing my activation at 11:21 with 2E0SAE. Having grabbed my mandatory minimum 4 QSOs I handed the PTT over to my co-activator and go to work setting up the HF antenna.
The sky looked angry for the entire activation and appeared to be threatening rain, so I moved the IC-705 under a tarp in case the clouds opened – but they never did. In fact, since we were ducked behind a wall it was actually quite pleasant.
We didn’t set up any fancy shelters, or bother with anything more than a roll mat to sit on we just got on with the activation and got it completed in under 15 minutes.
At 11:55 I grabbed another VHF contact with M0VZT and then jumped on 14MHz and made a summit to summit (S2S) contact with OM/SP9DZ who was sitting on OM/ZA-002 (Jakubiná) something like 1600km away.
At that point I handed over the PTT to my co-activator so they could grab the S2S and I started packing away. We spent under 1 hour on the summit, i made 6 QSOs, with one being an international S2S.
Failures
Taking a look through my notes for this activation it seemed like nothing went wrong at all, but there’s always room for improvement – and you can see from the photo above that I’m running my IC-705 into a small amplifier and a tuner before it reaches my Chelegance MC-750 – a telescopic vertical antenna that does not need a tuner. It’s only a minor thing, but goes to show that I could have cut my kit down further. I reorganised my kit list to include a separate listing for my IC-705 and my Yaesu FT-857 depending on which one I’m planning to take – and to separate my antenna requirements, so that if I don’t need something, I don’t end up carrying it.
Successes
Carrying the tarp in case of rain felt like a minor success, it was just something I threw in the kit on a whim and it took the anxiety out of the activation when I saw how bad the clouds looked over the summit. Plus the S2S was a nice win and made it feel like dragging the HF antenna up was worth it too. A lot of these summits that are near population zones can pretty easily be activated on VHF alone – I’m sure you could manage some of them on just a VHF handheld, but I’m glad I took the HF capability this time around.