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Wednesday 18 December 2019

GW/SW-013 Tor y Foel and GW/SW-011 Sugarloaf

A break in the weather and a few hours off meant a chance to activate two more summits. The sky looked quite pretty on the drive up, but the old saying “Red sky in the morning” came to mind.


First up today was SW-013 Tor y Foel. The drive up was good and ice free. We arrived at the parking spot and we were soon on our way up the hill. This one isn’t a long walk, but does have 3 fun little rises before the actual summit. From the start the wind started to pick up, but thankfully it was dry.




We reached the summit and looked for some sort of shelter. We found a small hollow big enough for the two of us and set up our gear. With the hf and vhf antennas up, the poor pole was bending well in the wind. Thankfully it held up.





We started on vhf, and although I posted a spot on the SOTA site, things were pretty quiet. 2 contacts were made, but then it went quiet (we were early on summit). We switched to hf and called on 20m. I took half a dozen contacts and Maldwyn took quite a few more. After this we went back to vhf to see if anyone was looking for us, but it was quiet, so after a few CQ calls, we shut down and packed away the gear, wanting to move on to summit no.2. The walk down was very windy, even managing to throw me around!



The drive to SW-011 Sugarloaf was quick and without event. We soon found the car park and after a quick coffee, we started walking towards the hill. The cloud was very low here, and while the wind was much easier at lower levels, visibility was not wonderful.




The walk up was quite quick, and we were soon on summit. Again, we managed to find a hollow on one side of the summit just away from the trig point, with the antenna set up on top. Bar a few walkers braving the cold and wind, it was very quiet.




This time we set up on vhf, with hf as a backup. Calls came in quite quickly and we both had the summit qualified in ten minutes. We managed a few more contacts after this before the weather finally started to come in, the wind picked up and it started with the wet stuff. I took a couple more calls, but we wanted to get down before getting drenched, so I called it. Sorry if there were any stations still waiting to contact us. We packed away with the wind getting stronger and were soon heading back down.




It didn’t take long to get back to the car, and we headed home... luckily we missed the worst of the bad weather which started as we left the mountain. I’m so glad we were not up there when it came in.

Many thanks to the stations that answered our calls and called us. Also, again, apologies to anyone that we missed at the end.

73, Ian 2W0IWM/p and Mal GW6OVD/p

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