Amateur Radio · VHF/UHF · Summits On The Air · Colorado Mountains · Adventure
For the June VHF contest, I operated Single-Op Portable from the summit of Pikes Peak. I combined this with Summits On The Air (SOTA) and Parks On The Air (POTA) activations. In a few hours, I made 80 QSOs on 6m, 2m, 1.25m, 70cm, and 23cm bands. It was a fun time. Quite a few … Read more
This post was updated on June 4, 2022, after the summit house construction was completed. Perhaps this should be called The Slacker’s Guide to Activating Pikes Peak since I am going to describe the easy way to do a Summits On The Air (SOTA) activation on America’s Mountain. If you plan to hike up, you … Read more
In May, we met up with our friends Paul/KF9EY and Beth/KB9DOU for a trip on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Joyce/K0JJW and I had been on the parkway before but had not completed the whole route. We all thought it would be a great trip to do together, in about a week, so we would not … Read more
We have been looking for an opportunity to activate a SOTA summit in our home state of Indiana. Joyce/K0JJW and I were both born there and misspent our youth there. Of course, you might be thinking “there are SOTA summits in Indiana?” Yes, there are three. Two of them are on public land, one is … Read more
Amateur radio has a long tradition of innovation concerning technology and radio operating practices. This includes innovating with the use of phonetic (or fonetic) alphabets, as previously reported here: Twisted Phonetic Alphabet Today, April 1st, Steve/KM9G reports on the latest set of fonetics from the AFRL:
When doing VHF activations for Summits On The Air (SOTA), the radio range is dependent on the height of the summit and the surrounding terrain. The Radio Mobile website from Roger/VE2DBE is a great tool that can be used to estimate the radio range from a particular site. Repeater system owners often use tools like … Read more