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Summits On The Air OK/LI-014 Černá studnice

One of the SOTA summits are in relatively close proximity to my QTH, it is OK/LI-014 Černá studnice summit. So I packed my Icom IC-7300 to backpack, along with the battery, computer, antenna, rope, coaxial cables, headphones and some jewelery, hopped on my bicycle and went up to the hill!

It was Monday 8th of April and I started my trip around 18:15. The journey is around 6km long, however, you are cycling up all the time and having 10kg backpack on the back is not something I am used to 😁 So it took about 1 hour to get to the top. Another 15 minutes of unpacking and setting up the EFHW antenna, which was installed in horizontal fashion, about 4-7 metres above ground. I started about 19:30 by finding a free frequency on 40m and put myself in the SOTAwatch cluster with a note that this is my first activation ever. I thought that activating summit in the evening and note about first activation will help attract more people to chase me. Spoiler alert: it did not 😂

Journey through woods

I was running full 100W of power into the antenna the whole time. Started to call CQ (SSB only) for about 20minutes on 40m band and got 6 QSOs. Then I went to 20m band and got another 3 QSOs. And 15m yielded 1 QSO. No SOTA hunters chasing me on other bands at all 🙁

In 20:30 I decided to end up my SOTA operations and I dedicated the next hour to tuning across the band looking for stations calling CQ and also calling CQ myself a few times. This resulted in few QSOs, nothing special, but at least I added first contact with Macedonia into my log, so the trip was not useless 😁 At 21:30 it was pitch black already, and being surrounded by trees from all directions was certainly a scary experience for a city-raised kid like me. So I dismantled the antenna with the help of my bicycle front light, packed my stuff and went downhill home.

Trying hard to QSO

Lessons learned and conclusion

Even though I sucessfully activated the summit, I expected much bigher pile-ups. I will try to pull off next activation on different day of the week and time, this was probably not ideal timing. Also I totally forgot to add ‘portable’ modifier when calling CQ, and I also accidentally called FONE CQ on CW frequency until I noticed myself the mistake and went to correct part of the band, so I hope the HAM police will forgive me, I will be better next time, I swear! 👮

And also I have a picture and made something for my fitness on this trip, yay!