Summits on the Air

I've been getting back into Amateur Radio a bit lately, and I was reading RadCom (Radio Communications - UK magazine for hams) and saw something about "Summits on the Air" or SOTA.  So I looked it up last night.  It's a niche within the hobby where people take radios up hills or mountains to "Activate" a summit, and other radio enthusiasts try to log as many summits as they can.  For Activators, it's like Munro bagging with the added challenge of making radio contacts.  For Chasers, it's like Munro bagging without leaving home!  For both parties there are technical challenges either running a portable station or receiving weak signals from one.

We'd already planned to walk up Dumyat today, so I thought I'd take the handheld radio and see if there was any activity - not really expecting to make any contacts with the handy and its little antenna.

Much to my surprise, I put a call out with the SOTA reference for the hill, and got more than one reply immediately.  Over the course of 20 minutes or so I worked 5 contacts - which was enough to get me an "Activator" point for the hill.  One of the contacts was also working SOTA from another hill (Craiglee) so I also got 2 "Summit to Summit" points for that.  The number of points relates to the difficulty of accessing the hill - he was clearly more ambitious than me, but still well short of the maximum 10 points!

Since I only really found out about SOTA last night, and had no real expectations of making any contacts, I was pretty pleased with that...

I might be doing this again, maybe with a bigger antenna next time...