My activation for today was GM/SS-064 Tinto Hill which sits south of Glasgow, it’s a very popular walk and as it exceeds 700 meters in height is classified as a four point summit. It’s also a very popular one for SOTA with 145 activations to date! Fun fact, my first ever QSO when I registered my foundation callsign was with a SOTA activator on Tinto!
I was joined on this activation with Douglas MM7DCD and also Kris MM7OAI. This was Kris’s first SOTA activation having obtained his license earlier on this year.
We met at the car park which sits North of the summit, the car park can get busy but it was far from at capacity when we arrived and left. I checked the car park on Google Maps before I left and was pleased to see it has been extended since the Google photos were taken. The car parking is free too!
The walk is very well marked and clear all the way from the car park to the summit. I tracked the route with my smartwatch, you can view here on Strava if you’d like.
We got to the summit in a little over an hour, but the conditions were not favourable. The winds were very high and the moisture in the air was getting both us and the equipment soaked as can be seen in the video below.
We each had handhelds with us that we could have worked from independently, I also had my Icom IC-705 and Slidewinder DX with me but due to conditons we opted to operate together from the same radio and turn around the activation quickly. We finished the activation with 12 contacts on 2M FM.
Despite the less-than-ideal weather conditions for an activation we were happy to get out and complete another activation, it also gave Kris a good feel for how an activation goes! I remember feeling a little nervous last year when calling out “CQ SOTA” from a random hill!
