Preparation:

As the pandemic lockdown situation combined with winter weather continuing, I was eager to get out onto a couple of simple summits and bag a few contacts along with some winter bonus points. My original plan was to head to a group of four which are reasonably close together but two of the four can be difficult to access depending upon the ground condition and as we had had multiple days of rain, following 2 weeks of snow, I was not hopeful for those, but depending upon how the first two summits went and what the ground was like on those, I could add one or two of the others into the day.

The gear would be the (now standard) X108G and battery in my rucksack and HF-PRO2 antenna but also taking along the old linked dipole and the surveyors tripod and 10 metre mini-mast as the main two summits are easy to access and have room for the mast.  

The Activations

As it turned out on the first two summits Peissenberg and Rentschen, there were large patches of soft wet ground and so the decision was made early not to attempt the two more susceptible-to-rainwater summits (Ammerleite and Kirnberg) this time, rather leave them as a pair to be activated when the ground dries out somewhat. So here are my reports on the two summits that I did activate.

Peißenberg DL/AM-001

Peissenberg has two good activation point. One on the very summit alongside the church and one in the car park below the graveyard. The first has a nice seat and fence where I can attach the mast and run the wire antenna out to a flagpole in one direction and down around a try to a second bench seat in the other direction. While this was still quite early in the day and we are still in lockdown, I didn’t expect that many people to be around. It seems that since this was the first fine day in some time all the local walkers were out and two had decided to sit at the bench that I normally use. If this wasn’t in the middle of a pandemic, it may have been possible to position myself closeby but mounting the mast would be an issue and being close to this pair who seemed to be going to stay there for some time, forced my decision to head down to the other location (still in the AZ). There I am glad to say was free of the public and indeed gave me lots of room to put up the surveyors tripod, 10m mast and linked dipole antenna.

The activation from Peissenberg was straight forward and I had 26 chasers call me (all at once it seemed) on 40m. With so many in the log, I decided to leave 20m but as I found out only later, I should have tried 20m as communication between portable stations in the UK and Australia was taking place via the long path. I had hoped for some greyline propagation on 40 metres but that did not eventuate, in fact, contacts were somewhat shorter distances than I am used to with only one contact from the UK and nothing from Scandanavia.

I had one member of the public who came by to ask if I had been taking photographs when I explained it was Amateur Radio he showed some interest and so he got a small brochure and my QSL card.

Once I could hear no more callers, I packed up and set off for my second summit.

Rentschen DL/AM-176

On arriving at Rentschen and almost getting stuck with the car at the spot where I always park, it was clear that the other two summits were out of the question with the land here being so boggy the other two would be underwater almost! I did manage to find a little harder ground to set up my station, right next to the Trig point Stone which marks the absolute summit. As Rentschen is a large flat plateau, it was easy to get the linked dipole strung out again, supported by the 10m mast and surveyors tripod.

Again I started on 40m, this time I worked a total of 30 stations before the clouds came over and a cold wind arrived. This was just around noon, so I decided after the calls dried up to pack up and head home as I had some AR podcasts to publish and some other computer-based AR work to complete.

l was happy to have got out away from the house, got some fresh air and make some radio contacts.

It’s interesting that I am now noticing some “new regulars” in the chasers calling me. I can only presume these are either people working from home or others that have returned to the hobby because of the lockdown. In any case, welcome! It’s good to have more join the party of SOTA.

 Photos:

   Peissenberg:

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   Rentschen:

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Equipment used:

• Mountaintop travelling 40-litre rucksack.
• Xiegu X108G.
• Surveyors Tripod and 10 metre DX-Wire fibreglass “mini-mast”.
• SotaBeams linked dipole.
• Battery box (2 x 5000maH hard-case 4S LIPOs).
• Painters thick plastic sheet.
• Lightweight headphones.
• Smartphone with PocketRxTx App and USB cable acting as an external display to the rig.

Logs:

DL/AM-001 Piessenberg:

DL/AM-176 Rentschen:

Conclusions:

• The grab-and-go approach works well combined with bigger antennas as well – this time I had more time and so decided to put up the big mast and dipole antenna, which takes longer but the simplicity of laying the rucksack on the bench or floor and simply opening the side and plugging in the antenna cable makes life really easy!

73 ’til the next summit.