SOTA - Summits on the Air

During a business trip, I took the chance to activate a mountain in the Bavarian low mountains - Kleiner Kulm.

Location

The mountain is registered at SOTA program as DM/BM-344 and is located near the city of Pegnitz, about 48km  northeast of Nuremburg.

Well, it's not the Matterhorn - but hey- everyone has started small :-)

This mountain as ideal for my first activation - not too high, not too steep to climb - ideal for an after work activation. Fortunately there is a wooden observation tower on the peak which can be climbed by stairs and forms an ideal antenna support.

Working conditions

• I took my new ELECRAFT KX3 with me. With its build in antenna tuner it does a quite remarkable job. I used full power output of 10W to warm up the Ionosphere.
• For the power I used a LiFePO4 battery with 12V 6,6Ah with a build in BMS.
• Microphone for the SSB contacts was the stock-mike from ELECRAFT.
• For CW I used the Palm Pico Paddle.
• And last but not least, my antenna was a HYENDFED 3-band antenna. This was the second chance, the antenna can show her quality. I tied the antenna to the railing on top of the observation tower at the peak of "Kleiner Kulm".
• As an ideal tool for chasing SOTA activation and publishing my own activation, I found the ANDROID APP SOTA Spotter. With this app you can easily inform the SOTA world, that you're activating a summit.

Contacts

I was really suprised how well the KX3+antenna+CW works. There was nearly a small pileup when I call CQ SOTA.

SSB was a little bit more annoying - there you feel the 10W from the KX3 - thats not much.

Conclusion

Well it was really fun to do my first SOTA activation. This was definitely not the last one.