Today Ian VK5IS and I met at Appila in the midnorth to head out to Hogshead VK5/NE-051 for another SOTA day of activating. We decided on the day to call by Mount Nadjuri VK5/NE-058 in the afternoon on the way home while we were close by. Hogshead  is a hard walk from the parking spot as far up as we can drive and ends up being about 2.4 km round trip. We noticed the new owner of the property is making a track up to the top which will be a steep 4×4 track once it is finished. Looks like the bulldozer driver may have chickened out up near the end of the track as it gets pretty steep and a big slope angle across the hill to make the rest of the way to the top tricky unless they can bench it some how .

A nice stone Cairn on this one built many years ago on top of the huge rock slab that makes the top area .

Ian into the pile up of locals on 80m first off with really good signals using the extensions again on the antenna. It was quite windy so we set up behind this rock ledge on the eastern side which was very comfortable in out of the wind. Had problems with the dipole later in the activation as some of the vk3’s on 40m ssb could detect a fault with our antenna. We even lowered it down to check but found nothing obvious until I got home and had a closer look finding the link alligator clip hanging on by maybe 2 strands of wire and in the wind, it may have been losing continuity .

Ian had a good pile up of chasers on 40m ssb and we both qualified with plenty of chasers gathering points.

I made several ssb contacts on 80 and 40 then worked some cw stations on 40 and managed to get a nice contact with ZL1BYZ on 20 cw.

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Hogshead is a great summit to visit as it is out on its own in the landscape and you get good views all round and I was able to point out to Ian the other summits in the area.

Thanks to all the chasers and the farmer for easy access to the summit.

regards from the Ian’s

CZ . .