It’s a haul to get up to the top of Apple Orchard Mountain.
At least the road is paved.
Of course we’re not going to go up there with only a TM-D700 and call it a day; no, we brought stuff!
I believe there were five HF/VHF+ transceivers that made the trip with several antennas, batteries, poles, tents, and other accouterments.
Like last year, we also decided to activate the summit for SOTA.
We were much more successful this year than last.
We did have some failures, but overall I think everyone enjoyed themselves.
Last year Dave had issues with his portable HF digital station but had this to say this year:
I had 15 contacts, 13 states, have 4 eQsl confirmations already and
maybe picked up VT as my 49th state. Dang, could have had DE and had
a WAS but couldn't hear Bob Balint, KF3AA.
Steve also had problems last year but was busy scratching contacts onto his log while working a pile-up on 40m.
He wanted to work 2m SSB but heard no one, which is unfortunate.
I, too, tried listening on the lower portion of 2m and didn’t hear squat which I found amazing from ~4200 feet.
No beacons or chit chat of any kind.
What was worse was the neighborhood RF seemed to be overloading the front end of my K1 making my Plan A QRP station completely inoperable.
Thankfully I was able to borrow a 40m dipole for a few minutes and put a few contacts in the log using my FT-857D.
I was actually talking with W2SE on 40m when I had a duh moment and grabbed the microphone on the D700 and called Comers Mountain and worked their crew for summit-to-summit (S2S) credit.
Hawksbill had already closed down so I missed my opportunity there, unfortunately.
In the end I managed 10 SOTA contacts which isn’t too shabby.
What worked well
APRS worked really well from up on the summit.
There was plenty of digipeater coverage below and that allowed us to send spots and communicate with others well.
APRS2SOTA worked spectacularly!
Being able to let the chasers know what frequencies were were operating on in real time via RF was priceless.
It’s easy to use, and I was able to interact with the service using only my D72 portable radio.
PSK31. Dave left his tablet and phone home last year but was ready this year and boy did he put some contacts in the log.
Of course you never really knew when he was working stations or just goofing off because he was always just sitting on the up-turned milk crate with the tablet in his hand looking around and chatting.
LifePo4 batteries. I purchased one of these batteries days before the expedition so I hadn’t had a chance to do anything except rig it with Anderson Power Poles and charge it up.
Turns out, the battery lasted for around five or so hours being hooked to the D700 being run on high power for the digipeater, high power on UHF for coordination with Comers, and on the FT-857D running 25-watts on HF.
When it stopped working (and boy did it stop) the voltage was a little over 8V.
It had recovered a bit by the time I had gotten home but I’ll call it a good day.
What didn’t work well
K1. The K1’s front end seemed to be overloaded from the high-RF environment that is Apple Orchard Mountain.
Unfortunately, I had planned on this being my primary operating radio and so the antenna I had brought was specifically for this transceiver.
Cellular phones. Up on top of the summit there is either too much competition for cellular signals or weird multipath happening.
Sitting in one spot I could watch my phone go from no signal to get a 3G signal to a 4G signal to nothing all within the time-span of a minute or two.
Walking to one specific location on the summit would yield a usable signal for text messaging and maybe a phone call where the rest of the summit was useless.
This problem seemed to be common to all carriers.
2m weak signal. Not sure what was going on as last year that’s pretty much all I worked.