9,137 Feet Tall on a phenomenal summit-to-summit activaion
3 OCTOBER 2021 W6/CT-005
Wow, what a day! The W7A Association was holding their 10 Point Madness event and I had a summit-to-summit pile-up! I had heard about this event through the NA SOTA reflector so I hastily planed this trip to a peak with decent points and a good eastern horizon. I was rewarded with 126 S2S points in about 2 hours!
Perhaps the best indicator of how well the day went was at the very start. Once I get the station set up I usually find a clear frequency, listen for a while and then ask if the frequency is in use. Then I start calling “CQ SOTA” with my DVR while I make the spot on SOTAWatch3 just to hold the frequency and make sure it stays clear for the spot. Before I could get the spot out the first thing I hear is “Summit to summit!” AE7AP on a peak in Utah found me just by randomly tuning around 7 MHz! Later I did the same thing. At one point calling CQ SOTA I had a pile-up of three S2Ss! Man, this was some fun!
Important note on Throop: cell coverage from Verizon was non-existent on the summit, but I discovered (too late) that it is good just a short way off the northwest trail. If I had known this I could’ve watched the spots on SOTAwatch3 and perhaps made a few more S2S contacts. I would’ve certainly saved a few bucks in Garmin Inreach Iridium Satellite SMS texts.
At that time I didn’t have the KX2 so it was UHF/VHF only. This is a good summit for that with excellent coverage of the LA Basin and points south. I had one S2S with Adam K6ARK down San Diego way.
This time I decided to take the HPS short-cut that bypasses the Pacific Crest Trail and cuts off about a half a mile
KG6MZS 