What a beautiful day for a hike! Mark K3MGM and Edward KO6DVZ joined me for this activation. The hike here is short, but steep. Trekking poles are highly suggested… so of course I forgot mine at home. Ha

Speaking of forgetting things at home, I also left both Garmin devices on the charger so no GPS track available today. Shocked I managed to get a radio in the bag 🙂

Mark packed my 3 element Arrow yagi for the activation. Today we left the IC-705 at home in favor of the Quansheng HT. The 705 is a better radio for 2m SSB and CW but let’s be honest, it’s an annoying rig to deal with. HEAVY, & requires an external battery for full power (more weight). I think I’ll find a POTA op to take it off my hands 🙂

Edward worked 10m on his new vertical antenna. Mark stuck with 2m mostly FM & SSB. I jumped in on SSB for a bit, but also used my KH1 for some 20m CW.

Furthest contact today was Aleksander S57S in Solvenia, a roughly 6,172 mile contact on 20m. Way cool!

Also neat today was that we were using Meshcore on the summit utilizing #socalsota hashtag channel. K6ARK was across town heading to Eagle Peak for an activation. We had very reliable text communication with him, even though we were unable to hear each other on 2m. Neat! Hoping more SoCal activators take advantage of this architecture available for spotting and S2S coordination.

Oh, and big thanks to Carol KE6SRN for the custom Arrow Antenna carry bag!

Other notable events from this trip, Edward rolled out of his chair down the side of the summit and I got stabbed in the foot by a yucca. We still had fun!