Wait, but there’s more! Yesterday’s outing to Mont Aurélien was going to be the last activation on this trip, but the family friends who have been sharing this wonderful week decided they’d like a hike up a hill, so we dug out one of the gentler routes to another local summit.
Continue readingA tougher than expected hike up found us meeting hunters and a very nice chap from Reims. No spectacular DX, but a very long day under Mediterranean sunshine surrounded by the ever present aroma of Provence – super day to end our first French SOTA adventure.
Continue readingWith such an unspectacular activation over at F/AM-829 Montagne d’Artigues earlier this morning we decided that a second outing was on the cards, ideally with a nice view and plenty of space to keep away from other hikers. Tête du Grand Puech delivered on all fronts and also threw up some surprise DX.
Continue readingStarted a bit later than usual this morning, so we chose a summit requiring no preparation, just park up, hike the only trail there is, get some contacts.
Continue readingDespite several years in the hobby (and what feels like a lifetime travelling in France) we’ve only just gotten around to activating our first SOTA summit, taking an early drive out while on holiday near Marseille. An epic hike, no people, and some amazing DX.
Continue readingJust a quick activation of our closest summit in order to hopefully catch some of the GM/ES contingent on their Spring Activity Day, and have a bit of a wander about in the snow. Both boxes ticked.
Continue readingQuick charge up the Island’s #2 SOTA summit in order to take advantage of the winter bonus. For some reason I always think of this one as being a lengthy hike, but today I timed it as being just 18 minutes up the side of Sartfell and another 12 minutes from there to the summit, so hardly strenuous.
Continue readingOne of the most useful features of modern Icom radios is the ability to find local repeaters using the built-in GPS receiver, but programming those repeaters can be onerous since few sources include the all-important LAT and LON coordinates.
Kudos to Mark M0LXQ whose CSV generator covers a range of formats and even allows you to insert a column containing distance from your own QTH, so you can manually sort the and limit the entries by distance from a given locator before importing the file into the radio.
If you’re new to this it’s worth mentioning that on the ID-52 / ID-50 (possibly others) you need to import the files into the repeaters list, not the regular memory in order to use the GPS function.
Another enjoyable activation carried out during our road trip through New England, with a slightly longer hike than anticipated but more than made up for by an encounter with a likeable fire warden in his tower.
Continue reading