An early start saw a cold morning with quite a bit of fog locally, but this seemed to lift as we headed towards the parking spot between the the first two summits.
On arrival, we found an empty Parking spot and it was blue sky sunny! with just a little ice and ground frost. The track and later “steps” up to Mynydd Troed are a particular favourite of mine... in a racing heart kind of way, so Mal pushed on ahead and I played catch up.
The steps section was particularly bad, with a lot of very slippery mud on the foot holds. Mal had no issue, but I found it hard going with my larger mass... I ended up walking up the clumps of heather. Slow, but safe. Take care if your heading up there in the near future. Once at the top, the remaining path to the summit was fairly good.
On MY arrival (some minutes behind my companion) Mal was already setting up (Hard week... my excuse), so I joined in to get the pole set up with guy lines and slim Jim. Mal was trying out his new Yaesu FT-857... but we immediately found we had an issue. The N type to SO259 was not to be seen, and mine was on my 857... and I didn’t bring my transceiver! ok. Umm... we were early on summit to the time on our posted Alert, so a quick swap around and we set up my Icom handset on the antenna.
Hard going... yes. 5w vhf from these two hills is hard work, but after a lot of calling and chasing we picked up 5 contacts as far afield as the Isle of Wight and Lancs... plus a summit to summit in North Wales, but virtually nothing local. The gear worked. Just hard for VHF.
We called it at that point having qualified the summit, so we packed up and headed down, trying a little detour to avoid the steps on the way down. It worked, but was 3x the distance. I’ll slide down on my rear next time.
Back to the car, we had a quick coffee, found the right adaptor for the 857 and then started to walk up SW-015.
The walk up this one is shorter and not at the same angle as Troed, and while the ground had quite a bit of frost in places, it was easy going as most of the mud was frozen or at least very firm.
We soon arrived in the activation zone and set up on some convenient rocks. This time, the 857 was brought into action on 2m and we called... and called... and called... now Llangrose is known to be a pain with VHF activations, but we have always found it fairly easy. Today, no. The gear was working fine, but after an hour and only 3 contacts, it was plan B and HF time. 20m was fired up and after 2 calls, Mal made contact with a string of US stations. I took over, and added a couple of contacts to qualify the summit. Wow... too close to a fail there.
Down was an easy stroll. Sadly, time had gone on, and I had to head back home, so activation no 3 didn’t happen this time. It’s planned for next time out.
Lessons? Spare adaptors kept in our bags. Handset makes a great backup in a pinch.
Many thanks to the stations that answered our calls.
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