It has been a few weeks since my last SOTA activation and with the weather looking reasonable I met up with Douglas in Muirkirk, Ayrshire to activate the two-point summit GM/SS-120 Cairn Table. I was actually in this area a couple of months back to activate GM/SS-184 Middlefield Law, I didn’t write a blog post for that one but did make a video on TikTok which you can view here if you’re interested.
I’d read a few walk reports online and Cairn Table seemed to be one that people really enjoy, it’s only about an hour away from where I live and is a fairly pleasant drive. If you decide to visit, I’d recommend parking at the Walker’s Car Park which has no charge.
I took us just over one hour to reach the summit, the route is clear to follow and isn’t too steep. This would be a great first hill for someone, some parts of the route are a little boggy however and some of the duck boards are not in great condition but these are limited and easy to get around.
The summit at the top is very rocky, with plenty of places to shield yourself from high winds which we were able to benefit from. The rocky surface made me think a little more about where I erected my antenna as I couldn’t just guy the telescopic pole anywhere. It didn’t take long to get set up, find a clear frequency and get on the air.
I was aware that radio propigation conditions were not great and experienced this first hand! I managed to achieve a mere three contacts over a 30 minute window on the 40M band which is pretty poor compared to previous activations, this even included me self spotting on SOTAWatch to attract other stations to call in. Members from my local radio club confirmed via group chat that they were seeing no activity on the bands. Requiring just one more contact to qualify the activation I switched to the 20M band and thankfully made another two contacts.
Best contact for distance was Finland, best contact overall was a summit-to-summit in Belgium and the funniest contact was me mistaking “EI” for “HI” and thinking an Irish station was from the Dominican Republic. 😂 So, not the best activation in terms of volume but it was a nice walk up and down. You can view the route taken here on Strava if you’d wish as tracked with my smart watch.
