Preparation:

As part of a holiday trip to the Freiburg area of Germany, on the French border, I planned an activation of Schauinsland, which is in both the SOTA and HEMA award schemes as a valid summit and also in the Parks on the Air POTA scheme as the summit sits within the Southern Black Forest National Park.

For equipment, I decided upon the usual G90 plus 6m mast and linked dipole antenna with tripod and HF-PRO2 as backup, all in my 40L rucksack.

The Activation Tuesday, 19th August 2025

This summit is relatively easy to access with a road up to the restaurant and then a short climb up to the actual summit, which has an observation platform on top of it. Access is via a well-marked walking track, and while not wheelchair-friendly, there were some mothers pushing baby seats up the track.

Upon arrival, the area directly around the observation tower was unsuitable due to the large number of tourists arriving and departing. Luckily, the adjacent field was relatively easy to access and gave enough space while keeping the public behind a wire fence.

Apart from a worrying warning about ticks, the location seemed perfect and I was set up in about 20 minutes, while the temperatures were not too bad (I applied sunscreen, however, as this location was in direct sunlight and the temperatures rose quickly as it was already nearly noon. I was glad, later that I had).

The bands were still a little noisy from a recent CME, and at this time of day, 20m is already dead, so I decided to stick to 40 metres to get enough contacts to qualify the park (10). I ended up with 16 contacts over 20 minutes, most of which, I believe, were SOTA chasers. There were summit-to-summit contacts. I had intended to stay longer, but after that 16th contact with Bernd, DL2DXA, the antenna’s VSWR shot up to an extent that the radio reduced output power. At that time, I suspected a bad connection on one of the links, but I could not see anything obvious and would not be able to fault-find to any level on the simmit. In these 20 minutes, the temperatures had shot up and even the radio was too hot to touch, so it was time to close down, pack up and head back down to the restaurant where my wife was waiting.

I was also unable to look at the antenna in our accommodation, so the Komunica Power HF-PRO2 loaded vertical would be the antenna in use for any further activations. Once home after our vacation, I tested the antenna for any DC breaks, and while I found nothing, I set the antenna up in the garden and put my antenna analyser on it – it showed an SWR between 8 and 10 to 1 across the whole HF spectrum. Something was definitely wrong. My presumption at this point was that with the excessive heat, the QRP balun may have failed, and so I took this out of circuit (it’s not essential when running low power to a centre-fed dipole). After doing this, I once again did a DC check on the antenna, and while I had connectivity to all the links, I also had a short between the outer and inner of the coax cable! It may be that the Balun was OK after all, but it’ll stay out of circuit for now. I then inspected the inside of the PL259 plug, and while there was nothing obvious, resetting the cable and re-testing removed the fault, and I could not make it recur. So now, I took the antenna back outside for testing on the analyser and now that 8 or 10:1 VSWR was 1.0:1 at 7.1MHz with the antenna set to 40m. Fault found and resolved.

Photos:

Equipment taken:

• Xiegu G-90 radio.
• Komunica Power HF-PRO2-PLUS-T loaded vertical antenna (not used).
• Tripod with radials (not used).
• 2 x 4Ah LifePO4 batteries.
• 40L Rucksack
• Inverted-V linked dipole
• 6 metre fibreglass mast
• Screw-in sun umbrella base
• Small headphones.
• Smartphone for spotting.

Log:

HEMA DL/HBW-042 and SOTA DMBW-008 Schauinsland plus POTA DE-0004 Südschwarzwald

Conclusions:

It was good to get an activation in, with bad weather threatening the following days. The sudden antenna failure was possibly heat-related or possibly just through constant use and packing, and unpacking. Now that I’m home, I will see on the next activation whether the fault is solved or whether it is time to replace the complete feedline to the antenna.

73 ’til the next activation!