View from Cringle Moor, North Yorkshire
After an enjoyable evening at the WEARS club the night before it was down to business and I was up at about 5:00 am (yawn). It had been arranged that Carl 2E0HPI would arrive at my hotel at around 5:45 am and we would embark on our 40 minute journey to the North Yorkshire Moors National Park, ready to ascend the summit. Summit operation is something I’ve not done to date so I was looking forward to the new experience. I’ve completed three WWFF activations in VK6 to date but have never done any summits, largely due to them being few and far between there.
Carl was there as planned and we were on our way. The plan was to be at the Lordstones car park by around 06:40 am with a 20 minute walk to the peak of the summit. We wanted to try and be on air for around 7:00 am with the hope that we might work some VKs from the summit.
We got to the summit and were QRV shortly after 7:00 am (06:00 UTC). The weather was absolutely perfect and the view was like being on the roof of the world. What an absolutely amazing location to operate from and it gave me an appreciation of why operators get a thrill from SOTA activations. The summit is both in the SOTA and WWFF programs and is SOTA reference G-TW002 and WWFF reference GFF-012.
We were rewarded for our efforts almost immediately. Carl fired up the FT817 and immediately heard Paul VK5PAS speaking with Mike 2E0YYY on 14.310 who was activating a SOTA summit. Carl called in and was immediately heard by Paul and we moved to 14.315 and were on our way.
I must admit to being surprised at how well Paul was receiving us, although I’ve done plenty of QRP operating and have worked VK from the UK with 5 watts (I worked VK from the UK from the Isle of Mull last October with 5 watts).
Jonathan VK6JON operating from Cringle Moor, North Yorkshire
He gave us a signal report of 5/3 and stated at the end of our brief contact that we were coming up in signal strength. Not bad with 5 watts and a half wave dipole supported by a fishing pole eh! The conditions have not been too good recently on the long path so that might explain my surprise or maybe I’m getting lazy 
.
We were QRV from Cringle Moor for a bit over 3 hours and my last contact was at 09:26 UTC. As I expected, Paul was our only VK contact and the contacts were from countries including Germany, Poland, Spain, Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, Italy, Croatia, Hungary and Finland. We operated on both 20 and 40 metres, with about 75% of the contacts being on 20 metres.
I reached the required number of contacts to activate the location for the WWFF program so all in all an enjoyable activation and experience. Thank you Carl for organising it all.
Tagged with: amateur radio • Cringle Moor • Flora and Fauna • North Yorkshire Moors • North Yorkshire Moors National Park • portable • portable radio session • SOTA • WWFF
Filed under: Amateur Radio
