It’s been quite the week of radio related nonsense for me, where I’ve been channelling my time and brainspace for radio into activity on air and system refinements, not working on Debian. POTA, Antennas and why do my toys not work? Having had my interest piqued by Ian at mastodon.radio, I looked online and spotted a couple of parks within stumbling distance of my house, that’s good news! It looks like the list has been refactored and expanded since I last looked at it, so there are now more entities to activate and explore. …

This was originally posted on SOTA Forums. It’s here for completeness of my writing. To Quote @MM0EFI and the GM0ESS gang, today was a particularly Amateur showing! Having spent all weekend locked in the curling rink ruining my knees and inflicting mild liver damage in the Aberdeen City Open competition, I needed some outside time away from people to stretch the legs and loosen my knees. With my teammates/guests shipped off early on account of our quality performance and the days fair drawin’ out now, I found myself with a free afternoon to have a quick run up something nearby before a 1640 sunset! Up the back of Bennachie is a quick steady ascent and in 13 years of living up here I’ve never summited the big hill! Now is as good a time as any. In SOTA terms, this hill is GM/ES-061. In Geographical terms, it’s around 20 miles inland from Aberdeen city here. …

tj and I figured that to fit the 3 Moray coast hills we were interested in climbing, now that the restrictions are eased, an early start would be required! The longest walk should go first and the activation times on each hill would be limited. Predictably, we left at 1030, got a bit lost and I got too excited on the radio, so none of the self made rules were followed! …

Here’re my first sota trip reports. I made some mistakes and have lots to learn still, but they were great days out and I’m dead keen to do more. Most importantly, I’ve got better at radio in general - I’m much more comfortable on a microphone, I understand the flow and format of an HF contact far better. It’s very different from the datamodes I’ve been doing for years! One thing that I’ve noticed, and it probably deserves mentioning, is that the SOTA web infrastructure is some of the best I’ve seen in ham radio. Modern looking sites, coherent single sign on and services sharing data in a really clever way. I upload CSV format logs generated by my logging program, cqrlog, and the SOTA infrastructure handles them and shares them with services like sotamapping, to show me maps of my contacts. SOTA spots appear on APRS, and I can spot myself to sotwatch using APRS messages. I’m super impressed! …