On the weekend of 31 Oct/1 Nov I attended the vkff conference at Albury on the VK2/VK3 border. I activated some summits for SOTA as part of the trip.

Of course on 2m I was using an Hourglass antenna with my FT857D. I started the weekend on Thursday 29th October activating four summits west of Canberra, then on Friday I first attempted one summit south of Tarcutta, VK2/RI-016, but the access route to the summit was not passable in my view at the time, in my Subaru Forester. So I left that one for later, going on to activate Vk2/RI-051 about 10 km south of the failed activation.

After that my plan was to activate Mt Jergyle vk2/RI-004 but my route to that summit was not well mapped and I decided due to the time of day to abandon that one too and proceeded to Albury where the conference started with a pub meal on friday night, presentations and discussion on Saturday, a dinner on Saturday night, a BBQ breakfast on Sunday morning followed by antenna making workshops. I elected to make an OCF dipole with transformer feed, but at the crucial moment my gas powered soldering iron failed me and the entire group was then sharing one soldering iron (owned by Gerard vk2io, the only other person to bring a soldering iron to a construction project (?)).

I then activated a local summit VK2/RI-033 Hamilton hill, probably named for the early explorer Hamilton Hume, after whom the Hume highway between Sydney and Melbourne is also named.

My setup at the summit was on the dilapidated remains of a picnic table. HF conditions were very poor but I did make a number of contacts on 2m ssb using the hourglass antenna.

I then drove over the border into VK3, to Huon Hill which Peter vk3ZPF had activated earlier in the day. Some good distances were worked from there using 50w tx pwr and the hourglass antenna. The contacts into the Canberra area had to cross several mountain ranges including the snowy mountains. Peter Vk3PF was at Mt Baranduda further south and was a huge signal only 10-15km away.

On the next morning I activated Baranduda vk3/ve-189 myself and relaxed for the rest of the day. On the trip home I first made a few contacts with activators on various summits using the ft817 on the passenger seat and a vertical whip, the antenna used normally for the APRS tracker. Worked VK1CHW on Huon hill from the car on the highway north of Albury, a bit later worked Peter VK3PF and used the grid locator function in VK Portalog to find my grid as a portable station.

Approaching the area between Holbrook and Tarcutta where VK2/RI-016 was located I decided to have another try at reaching it. After some stuffing around on fire trails and backing away from dangerous eroded roads I eventually reached the summit two hours later than planned, then activated, making several 100+ km contacts into Canberra, working Chris Vk2DO at Batemans Bay on the NSW coast and Peter Vk3PF who was at yet another VK3 summit somewhere. A good increase in my km total and another summit added to the multiplier.

A feature of nearly all my activations was working Geoff VK3SQ who leads the chaser table in this challenge, for VK.

I am encouraged to try making a double hourglass so that will be my next experiment. (I didn’t finish the OCF transformer or connect its wires, HF can wait.)

73 Andrew VK1DA/VK2DA