Preparation:

The DL association of HEMA came into existence on April 5th after my surveyed summits were accepted. I have been trying to get out and activate the first HEMA DL Summit since then. With equipment problems, COVID lockdowns, bad weather and illness delaying my attempt, I determined to get to this – my closest HEMA summit at last!

Since my last portable operation, I have bought myself a new radio. A XIEGU G90 – I have written a review on it which can be found here.  So this was to be a “trial of fire” for the new radio as well.

I had already visited the summit twice, taking two different approaches. The first was when there was still a lot of snow on the ground and was a long access route. The second visit and this one got my car much closer to the summit, leaving just a 10-15 minute walk up prepared tracks to get to the summit.

The Activation

The trip down to Hohenfurch (the nearest village to the summit) is straightforward using the B17 main road. It wouldn’t have been a few weeks earlier as the whole road is being resurfaced and improved. Further south on this road the main large bridge over the Lech River is closed for a month for upgrades (something to remember as I normally travel over that bridge to get to many of my favourite SOTA summits). As far as I was going all roadworks are complete and after leaving Hohenfirth, I took the road to North Schongau and immediately turned off it onto single track roads to take me to the closest parking point for the summit at (47.83556, 10.91673). Parking at the holy cross next to the ram-shackle farm it’s only a short 10-15 minute walk up the track to the summit. Just keep taking the track that goes upwards and then takes you under the high voltage electricity pylons and you are there. There is no local name for this summit, a lower one close by is the 774m high Schwalbenstein but if you end up there you have gone past the higher 780m summit, which, as it is over Rösenau on the River Lech and there is a small stone cross on it, (at 47.83556, 10.91673) I have called the HEMA summit Rosenau Kreuz. Hopefully, the sequence of photos below will guide future activators to the summit.

The summit area itself is fairly flat and so it’s possible to choose a location in the woods or on the open grassland. I arrived to find that the farmer had his cows grazing but they were in fenced-off areas below the power lines. I did have some pulsed noises on 20 metres during my activation and I wonder if this was coming from the power lines but generally this seems to be a very quiet location and the view down into the Fuchstal valley is amazing. A short walk through the forest gets you to the “LechErlebnisWeg” walking trail that is part of the famous JakobsWeg pilgrim’s way and gives lovely views down to the River Lech. 

I think the combination of the fact that HEMA is a much smaller community than SOTA and a contact with a German portable station, isn’t of a lot of interest to most watching the DX Cluster in Europe, is what made contacts hard to come by.

I was thankful to have contacts with Mike 2E0YYY/P from HEMA summit G/HSP-021 Overmoor on both 40 and 20m. My first H2H contact and the first into the new DL association!

For its first trip out, the new XIEGU G90 performed well. It still suffered from an inexperienced user though. All but my last contact on 20m were made with the attenuator on and the preamp off. Despite that, the few signals that were on the band were strong enough and once the preamp was turned on I still had an S0 noise level! Apart from some annoying pulse noise which could have been coming from the nearby 33KV power lines, both 40 & 20m were very quiet – unfortunately, that also meant not many signals. I was happy to find that the speech compressor in the rig performed a lot better than the one in the X108G which distorts speech when set at any value above 2 out of 10. I actually managed to be able to read the display the whole time, even in sunlight and didn’t have to revert to my external (Android smartphone) display.

I did hear one VK6 station but he was in a net with several other stations and I had no chance of getting in. I was hearing the VK6 at S1 and that was partially due to having the attenuator engaged – I guess he may have been S3 without the attenuator and with the preamp on.

I managed contacts with 5 different stations in all and so I had qualified my first HEMA summit.

  All in all, an enjoyable morning out!

 Photos:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Equipment used:

• Mountaintop travelling 40-litre rucksack.
• Xiegu G90.
• Komunica Power HF-Pro2-PLUS-T loaded vertical antenna. (not used)
• Modified mini photo tripod with clip-on radials (not used)
• Lamdahalbe 6m mini-mast.
• Screw-in sun umbrella base.
• SotaBeams linked dipole.
• Battery box (2 x 5000maH hard-case 4S LIPOs).
• New 4000maH LiHV battery (not used).
• Painters thick plastic sheet.
• Lightweight headphones.
• Smartphone with PocketRxTx App and USB cable acting as an external display to the rig. (not used)

Log:

 

Conclusions:

• The band conditions were not good and a HEMA summit does not attract as many callers as a SOTA one does, so getting contacts were difficult.
• The new radio performed well (especially when I turned the attenuator off!).

73 ’til the next summit.