Today was a special day as it is one year ago today my Mother died from Parkinson’s Disease and I was out on SE-007 that day activating so I thought it appropriate to be out there again today. It was a great day to be out, weather was really nice with a gentle southerly breeze at the summit just enough to fill the flags. 

After parking the SOTA transporter at the main gate it is about 2.5 km to the top from the entrance to Forest Departments land.

I find walking straight along the creek line once off the road the easiest path to take and you soon are in the old forest that is left after a big bush fire that destroyed probably 75 % of the forest a few years ago.

There is a dam at the end of a plantation of hardwoods and that is where you pick up another boundary track around the plantation of pines. This is where the pain begins as you make lots of gain heading up to the saddle of the range before heading south to the summit.

This time I must have been feeling a bit fitter as I made the gate in the old stone wall without too much puff and pain but stopped for a rest anyhow.

I got a photo looking north towards Jamestown from here and what a great view of the remaining forest that is left.

This time I activated south of the trig point because there was some shade from a few of the remaining pines right on the top and the old fence gave support to my squidy . Other times I have been on this summit it was really windy so I set up behind the stone wall out of the wind.

The Fire destroyed all of the pines on the eastern slope of the summit apart from just a few right on top so that was my shack for the day in the shade.

Used the KX3 and 20/40m Sotabeams link dipole and I made some local contacts with VK5WG and VK5NWE on the VX8G on 2 metres.

The SSB contacts were all on 40m and I got through to vk2 vk3 vk6 and vk7 then made some qso’s on 40m cw and got a nice surprise to get a call from ZL1BYZ on 20m cw near the end of my activation.

Total of 14 qso’s  with some double up qso’s on ssb and cw.

Thanks to all the chasers for the QSO’s today .

Vale Valery Joan McRae

thanks for reading my blog.

Regards from Ian VK5CZ ..