Following the activation of GM/SS-126 Earl’s Seat we decided to knock out the neighbouring summit Meikle Bin, which is also a two point summit. I completed this activation with Douglas again, I twisted his arm to try Portable Logger (PoLo) rather than logging his contacts on pen and paper - I think the jury is out! 😐
As with my prior walks I tracked this using Strava, if you’d like to view click here.
We planned to park at Todholes and follow the Walk Highlands route but unfortunately the car park was closed. We parked at the side of another road about 100 yards to the west.
From leaving the car we reached the summit in 1hr20min, we expected a longer or more challenging route for a two point summit but we won’t complain. As we walked up the views below became less and less, it was a total whiteout at the summit.
I planned to focus solely on HF for this activation but we heard another SOTA station calling on 2M FM while setting up the antennas so I had that one in the log. Using the linked dipole this time I worked a pileup on 20M then dropped to 40M. I finished with 34 contacts in the log, 7 of those being summit-to-summit. As it’s 4th May (Or for those in the USA… May 4th) I unlocked a surprise badge on the SOTA Database “Force Sensitive”. 🙂
The summit was pretty popular with intrigued visitors who asked lots of questions about the equipment and what we were up to. I often direct these people to YouTube or TikTok to learn more, it reminds me that I should start carrying a leaflet/handout and that I should also make more quality content for my own TikTok profile.
As we finished up we noticed that the fog was starting to lift and we could get a little view from the summit.
Overall a great activation, the start point being about an hour from my house. I’d happily do this one again!
