Shifting weather activation.

  • Summit height: 1606m
  • Transportation: driving
  • Rig: TH-D72E, 5W, internal battery
  • Antenna: Diamond RH770 telescopic, handheld
  • QSOs: 4 on 2m, FM

It’s the weekend: time to pack up the family and radio and activate a summit! We headed out towards HB/NW-015 but after an on-the-go change of plans to accomodate the baby sleeping schedule we ended up doing a longer drive to Chasseral instead.

The summit is on a really nice looking ridge with no trees, and fully accessible by car. It was raining quite heavily several times on the way, making me worry about the radio part. It all stopped by the time we reached the top, but between the risk of rain and the rather cold air I didn’t want to set up a HF antenna. I had thankfully thrown my VHF/UHF handleld into the backpack so I picked that up instead.

After spotting myself on SOTAwatch and calling CQ on 2m I scored a nice QSO with Beat HB9TWG/M who was somewhere on a freeway (couldn’t quite understand all of the German :). One other quickly followed then, once I managed to open up my squelch, also heard and worked DJ5AV.

Three down, one to go – but nobody else was answering. I tried the 70cm band with no success. After moving back to 2m and calling CQ for a while longer, HB9FRA/P came back and helped complete the activation.

Finishing up, we had lunch watching the clouds go by at the Hôtel Chasseral nearby then drove back home.