On a Saturday morning in early March, I had to ferry my son to Brighton and return to home, which, with a small diversion, brought me near Ditchling Beacon, a SOTA summit at 248m ASL, so I decided to seize the opportunity for some fresh air and altitude. Working on 2m & 70cm, I’m always up for some height assistance, and the view from the Beacon is usually spectacular.

After a post to #portable-and-sota with mere hours notice, I got a response from Kelly, G6AWK, who lives in Brighton, and had coincidentally been thinking about doing some radio on Ditchling; Szymon, M0GZP, who said he'd listen out for me; and another OARC member, who was skeptical (with good reason, it turned out) of my chances of success with PMR446 that I mentioned as a 'While I'm here, I'll give it a shot' bonus experiment that I planned to fit in.

I arrived at the car park for Ditchling Beacon with the temperature in single digits. This hadn’t perturbed people - the car park was full, walkers were coming and going, and a few paragliders were up getting lift along the ridge. There was, bizarrely, an ice cream van in the car park - for Wim Hof afficionados I guess (although Ice Cream for Dogs was also advertised). Deciding to conserve my core temperature for radio operation, I instead elected to don 3 hats, 2 fleeces, a Goretex jacket, and 2 scarfs, and head up the hill. In a gap in preparation, I found that I'd forgotten my gloves.

The ascent from the car park to the summit at Ditchling Beacon, a gentle, grassed chalk incline, could probably be achieved on 2 lungfulls of air. On my way up, I checked my phone to see the message that Kelly was already in situ, and cresting the summit, I saw a mast set up in the adjacent field and 2 heavily-becoated figures sat on a groundsheet, playing radio.

The odds of a productive radio looked better for Kelly, whose setup was an ICOM transceiver and SOTABeams antenna / mast setup, whereas mine was a clutch of Baofengs, a flowerpot antenna, a painter’s pole and a Christmas tree stand. When I rocked up, Kelly was patiently monitoring activity on 20m while I set myself up a few metres away.

After an introductory chat, I began listening around for activity, spotting myself on SOTLAS and then calling CQ on 2m. My first contact was almost immediate, but (not initially recognising the callsign) it turned out to be … Kelly, which confirmed at least that my radio was transmitting successfully within shouting distance.

I spent some time calling CQ on 2m, then gave PMR446 a crack (but hearing only a single, brief and unintelligible transmission over several minutes of attempts, and no responses to my call-outs) before I decided to flip over to 144.600 MHz and try some CQ with Rattlegram, which I did at intervals for a few minutes also. The Rattlegram app works well and is easy to use but to no avail - nothing heard, so after some more Voice CQ on 2m, I moved to the backup plan of hitting repeaters and putting the idea of a SOTA activation on ice.

2m conditions must have been flatter than dxinfocentre.com implied, as most of the repeaters I tried gave no response tones. Previous visits to Ditchling Beacon have yielded a lot of simplex contacts and reach into a variety of repeaters in all directions. Rechecking Discord on my phone, I saw that Szymon had been listening out for me but not heard anything (although it turned out that I hadn’t started transmitting - late arrival at summit - before he had to sign off).

Part way into the afternoon, Kelly was taking a lunch break and asked if I wanted to give the HF rig a try. After a brief orientation, and some preliminary listening around to get acquainted with conditions on 20m, I landed on a quiet frequency, made an In Use check, then started calling CQ SOTA. Being new to HF, hearing other stations fading in and out without responding to CQ calls takes some getting used to. Eventually though, after hopping frequencies a few times, my CQ call got an initial response, then more ensued, with stations in Sweden, Italy and Slovakia among the contacts, including several Summit-Summit responses. The signal reports were mostly excellent on either end, and the pileup went on for around half an hour.

This was a great first experience of operating HF, and thanks to Kelly for the use of gear and operational guidance. It takes a bit of getting your head round at first so the tips and encouragement were very welcome.

Firsts:

Operation on HF (Simplex RF-based) contact with stations outside UK Summit-Summit contacts Completed SOTA activation

Coda - I returned to the summit the next day for what I expected to be a briefer spell (but ended up spending just as long there and getting slightly colder than the day before). The 2m activity was little better on simplex although I did get several QSOs, as well as a few repeater-based contacts, accessing more than the day before. I plan to get some French coastal repeaters programmed into my HTs before I return to Ditchling as one of my contacts, QTH Hastings, mentioned that they are routinely reachable. This time, I did manage to contact Szymon - barely on 2m simplex, but then in a short but satisfactory QSO through GB3GF.

Links:

Ditchling Beacon on SOTA Website

National Trust - information and photos

Portable operating for the terrified or inspired Michael Sansom / G0POT

Lightweight and Portable End Fed Halfwave for 2M - Tim / G5TM