Preparation:

This activation was rescheduled three times because of bad weather. The aim was to activate DL/AL-169 Auerberg, DL/AL-170 Zweiselberg and DL/AL-172 Senklekopf. Thursday afternoon sunshine was predicted to start and continue through Friday.

 These are three different summits, with different levels of difficulty to reach and different amounts of space available for antenna installations.

Auerberg is a relatively easy summit but space is restricted, the wire beam I have been using will not fit in here. The OCF would be used on this summit as it enables quick band changing in what was likely to be cold conditions. The second summit, Zwieselberg has enough open space for the beam however is a difficult and long climb up a track but I wanted to use the beam from this summit. The last planned summit Senklekopf is even more difficult to get to along single-track farm roads and then up the edges of fields rather than tracks. Although there is enough room for the beam, the extra weight to carry up the steep route, meant that for this summit I planned to use my linked dipole. There was however a problem, with Senklekopf being in the afternoon, there was a good chance that 10 metres would be open to North America and my SOTABeams Linked dipole does not have a link in it (yet) for 10 metres.

I realised however, that if I took two of the the linked dipole elements that I had recently built and calibrated for the wire beam, I could easily build a linked dipole with those same bands (10, 12, 15, 17 & 20m) available. So a new feed-point plate with just two element connections was made up and put in the wire beam box.

All was set, three summits, three different antennas – set the alarm for 6:30 am – what could go wrong?

The Activation

DL/AL-169 Auerberg

As normal I woke 30 minutes before my alarm went off and was all packed and out of the door at 7:30 am as planned for a 9 am start on Auerberg. I normally combine Auerberg with Weichberg as they are close to each other but having already activated Weichberg this year I could not get any more points for it, so I effectively drove past the summit and onto Auerberg. There was some early morning fog which I hoped would clear. It did not, rather as I approached Auerberg, it got worse and worse so that I was slowly down considerably from my normal driving speed. Surprisingly as I arrived at the car park for Auerberg, I came out of the fog and into the sunshine however, all around was under about half a metre of snow. This is not such an issue at Auerberg as the walk from the car park up to the church which sits on the actual summit is up steps with a solid handrail. After sliding a little in the car park, however, I wished I had my shoe spikes with me (I did not).

  On arriving at my usual operating position at the rear of the church I was greeted with half a metre of frozen solid snow on top of the benches which need some good repeated kicks to clear off to make space to set down my rucksack and later the radio. I used my normal way to support the 6-metre mast here by “Bongo-tie”ing it to a fence post and running out the two wires from the balun to fence posts along the border of the drop at the rear of the Church. The coax was run back across the path and to the bench and the radio set up. It was 9 am (0800 UTC) exactly.

I had arranged with Ernie VK3DET to call him at this time, so I checked the Signal messenger and he said he was just about to leave 20 metres to try for a contact with Dave G4AKB on 17 metres but he would be back. Well, as he gave me the frequency on 18MHz, I simply went there and called him and we got a contact in before Dave had left 20m. The equipment was working! As Ernie was waiting for Dave on 17m, I went onto 10 metres put up a spot and was called straight away by EA8DDW from the Canary Islands (officially Africa – so that was two DX continents in the first two contacts). That was to be the only confirmed contact on 10 metres – even though I had half a contact to another SOTA summit in Poland – that would have been groundwave as it is far too close because of the skip distance on the 10 metre band and signals were at the noise level.

Following this I bagged Ernie VK3DET in Australia another two times – once on 15 metres where he was again waiting for Dave, who I could hear, but he could not hear me and also 20 metres which was so full of stations it was really difficult to find a free frequency (and this on a Friday morning).

Although I now had four (or maybe 5 with SP9JTR/P on SP/BZ-024) contacts, these were not 4 different stations, so I still needed a couple more contacts to officially “qualify” the summit. 

Moving to 40 metres gave me eight more contacts in four minutes, after which it was time to pack up and head to the next summit.

The fog still had not lifted and it was as though I was driving down into the clouds when I wound my way back down the road from the summit. I chose not to take the small farm road that the GPS was suggesting as the shortest way to get to the next summit and continued down into Bernbeueren to take the main road. All the time I was hoping that as I approached the next summit, the fog would lift and the snow start to disappear – neither did and as I got probably 90% of the way, I could see that the small roads around had not been cleared well enough for a normal car and that would also mean that the track to the Zwieselberg summit would most likely be blocked. I made the call and turned and headed home rather than heading to either of the other two planned summits. Senklekopf would have been even more difficult to approach as that requires about 10 minutes of driving along a single-track farm road to even get to the parking spot.

Photos:

DL/AL-169 Auerberg:

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Equipment taken:

• Mountaintop travelling 40-litre rucksack.
• Xiegu G90 radio.
• Screw-in sun umbrella base(not used).
• 7 metre fibreglass mast (not used).
• 6 Metre Lambdahalbe mast.
• 10-metre band 2-element wire beam (manual switch version) (not used).
• Komunica Power HF-Pro2-PLUS-T loaded vertical antenna and tripod (not used)
• SOTABeams Linked Dipole (not used).
• Aerial-51 404-UL 40 metre Off Centre Fed dipole.
• 4 Ah Eremit LifePO4 battery.
• 4 Ah LiHV battery(not used).
• Painter’s thick plastic sheet.
• Gardener’s kneeling pad.
• Electrical hand warmer.
• Lightweight headphones.
• Smartphone for SOTA spotting.

Log:

DL/AL-169 Auerberg

 

Contacts map

 

Conclusions:

• You can’t trust weather forecasts. Although disappointing, the cancellation of summits 2 & 3 was the right decision and hopefully if the weather improves, I may get a chance to activate them before the end of March (when the winter bonus points stop).

• The OCF and 6m mast along with the Xiegu G90 are still adequate to the task although 10 metres does seem very quiet compared to other bands on the radio.

73 ’til the next summit.