It’s now well over 3 years since SOTA has been going in South Australia and I would like to talk about what equipment I have got to use for activating summits. As followers of my blogs some would have read before about me raving of this or that antenna which seemed to work at the time, well some of them are now stored away in my cupboard of experiences. I am now convinced that a  link dipole is probably my final choice cut for the bands I would be most likely use to make enough QSO’s to qualify a summit. Of course filling up my log with as many contacts as possible is a priority to keep my band of willing chasers happy as well. But there is something still in the back of my mind to live the dream by activating and making contacts using an end fed wire via a small qrp tuner into my QRP cw rig. It has taken a while for cw only activations to take place in Australia with Wayne VK3WAM and Warren VK3BYD mainly pioneering the way and encouraging chasers to get on cw and give it a go. I personally have only done two cw  activations, because  early in my time of activating I wanted to be sure I would find enough qso’s to qualify the summits after all the effort I put in getting there.

So this is the equipment I use.

SOTA Beams link dipoles one cut for 30/15 metres the other cut for 40/20 meters with rg 174 coax.

53 foot EFRW and 31 foot EFRW antennas I use with a 9 foot counterpoise wire .

HB-1B 5 band CW rig with 2200 mA battery + MT 1 tuner + EFRW + CP.

KX3 tunes both EFR Wires nicely once I worked out how long to cut them .

My best system for SOTA

KX3 and link dipoles cut to resonance with 4 possible bands .

 

Logging kit for either CW or SSB .

Accessories for windy summits,  voltage dropping diodes and flags to fly.

Batteries to run KX3 and  HB-1B with charging system.

Higher voltage batteries require bigger charging systems.

I use a 8m squid pole to support my antennas when on a summit.

Fully kitted SOTA transporter.

 

Thanks for reading .

Ian vk5cz ..