No kidding. Coincidentally I recently started contemplating learning archery. Too many interesting things... You got a 705! How audible is the relay switching when you're doing CW?
Traditional archery is a great hobby. Its been 11 years since purchasing my first longbow and i still love it just as much now as i did then. As for the 705 relay. You can certainly hear it but I dont think its that bad honestly. I don't think its any louder than my FT818.
Saturday was a beautiful tshirt weather day. Many people were up and down tower so I did not setup on it. I had no problem making 5 contacts from the area 5-10 meters west of the base of tower otherwise I’m sure I could have had many more. I was running out of daylight and quickly packed up in order to head over to Sugarloaf. The Yagi is outstanding for the elevated but flat top mountains of PA. My next goal is Blue Knob and Shaefferhead near Altoona. I think those may require significant time for 4 QSOS since its in a more remote area.
I was listening to 20m yesterday around 5:00 PM (local). The band was really quiet, but I decided to call CQ on 14.060 to see if there was any life out there. After my first call, I got a reply from W5MSV. We had a nice chat, and we were 599 both ways. I was running 5 watts, he was running 10. 775 miles point to point. I've also been doing a lot of FT8 at about 5 watts. The results have been surprisingly good. Actually not much different than running 50-75 watts...
Just spent a week based at Little Kyeburn Huts in the Oteake Conservation Park, Otago, New Zealand. On air each night. 20m was unbelievable Wed and Thur nights. 2 SSB QRP to QRO contacts with Australia - one with a portable IOTA activation (OC137 off Brisbane), the second easy armchair copy to Woolongong. And to top it off, and two contacts with Italy on 20w (OK - not QRP, but still!) - all around 8pm. If only it were always that easy! Reliable national-level NZ contacts on 40m around 7:30pm and 80m after sunset at 8:45pm - all on 5w.
This past weekend I had a great SOTA outing, which turned out to be remarkable in unexpected ways. I had to forego where I really wanted to go due to an uncomfortable number of people crowding the trail head, so I headed to a peak I had activated before but failed to get enough QSOs to qualify. It was a short, steep hike to the top of W6/CT-150. An end-fed half wave antenna with a 49:1 unun was my radiator and my KX2 was dialed down to 5 watts. One cool thing is that I tried out APRS2SOTA, which allows you to send an APRS message to spot yourself. It is unbelievable what a response you get with a spot. I made 11 contacts, one of which was an S2S (N6AN; he sends too fast for me. ). Now for the amazing part. Taking down the call signs in the middle of the rush I never even gave a thought to their origins. I asked almost all for repeats of their calls to be sure, and when I finally got around to entering them I was astonished to realize the following call signs and their origins were in my list: F4WBN - France GD1C - Isle of Man U6UDO - Russia I was in disbelief, but I confirmed the French contact with an email. Sure enough, it was good. The other two are not listed in QRZ, but I am quite sure of the call signs and I recall asking them to resend. On top of it all I got great signal reports, and to me they sounded solid. All this from the top of a hill in Southern California with 5 watts. Amazing. This image is nothing to write home about, but I always like to include a visual. This is the guyed mast holding the end of the antenna, perched at the very summit.
There are 57 SOTA summits in Ohio! In the south east section there are a lot of them that have yet to be activated! Check out the W8O association on the sotamaps page: https://www.sotamaps.org .
The problem with many unactivated summits is they tend to be on private property or inaccessible for other reasons. There are a number of official summits near me in VA that will never be activated for that reason. Chris
