With the forecast looking positive for the weekend, I planned my first SOTA activation of the year. I met again with fellow club member Douglas MM7DCD for this walk. We parked up just off the A875 as you enter Killearn and started the walk at Lettre Farm. This route avoids the climb over Dumgoyne. I tracked the route on Strava if you’d like to view, click here to view.
There isn’t much of a walk in to this one and you make progress pretty quickly. There is a clear path the whole way but there are many splits in the path therefore you’ll want a map to ensure you are going the correct way.
The path does get a little rougher and there is some bog along the way, but nothing terrible. The photos below were taken about 20 to 30 minutes into the walk. Here you can see Killearn.
We were both a little unfit therefore the walk took us longer than anticipated, it took us two hours to reach the summit from the car.
I’ve really been impressed with the Quansheng handhelds and brought one of those along with me for the 2M/VHF contacts, I used the radio with only the Nagoya NA-771 with success. For the HF activity I brought along my recently purchased Slidewinder DX Multi Section Vertical with the ground spike and four radials. Using the Xiegu X6100 I made a few more contacts with ease on the 20M band, including two summit-to-summit (S2S) contacts in Switzerland and Italy. I finished the activation with 21 contacts.
Portable Logger App (PoLo)
During the week I was made aware of a new portable logging app by Ham2K. The app Portable Logger or “PoLo” for short is currently in beta testing. I installed this on my iPhone and planned to use it exclusively for this activation. I’ve already provided the developer some feedback which is very positive, the app worked perfectly and was a real pleasure to use.
Below is an example of the interface during use. It’s very quick to enter the station details and QRZ lookup confirms their name and location, if they are also at a summit the “S2S” button sits next to the frequency and is easy to plug in.
At the end of the activation it’s great to go back and see a visual of the stations that you had a contact with. I took me less than a minute to export the ADI file and upload it to SOTAData, QRZ and import to my main desktop logging software.
If you’d like to learn more about PoLo, click here for more details!