My activator score after the Gippstech trip was 984 so I was then able to plan two activations of 8 point summits to reach and exceed 1000 points, the requirement for the Mountain Goat award under the SOTA programme.

Thursday 19th July brought reasonable weather and Friday was forecast with rain and snow down to 900m.  The summit I had in mind was Yankee Ned, Vk2/SW-026 at just over 1200m, but I did not plan to sit in falling snow, sleet or rain while doing it.  So Thursday it was and I set out from Yass in the morning, arriving at Wee Jasper about 50 mins later, then reaching the summit parking spot at 90 or 100 minutes.  Remarkably there was logging traffic on the Wee Jasper forest road and the dry weather allowed the truck to stir up a huge dust cloud, making it necessary to drop back and allow the dust to settle.

At Yankee Ned it was a 20 min walk up to the summit itself, where I set up my ZS6BKW doublet, the LDG tuner and the FT817.  I also had brought an amplifier and planned to try it if conditions made contacts with the 5w power level too difficult.  As it happened, after making only one contact on 80m CW and making no SSB contacts after calling for 10 minutes, I decided to connect the amplifier into the antenna circuit between the radio and the ATU.  It made quite a difference, and I was able to make a string of contacts in short time.  One contact was with Tony VK3CAT who was mobile in Melbourne and offered to stop shortly and give me a CW contact.  That was the first of several CW contacts and I was very pleased to qualify the summit on CW as well as SSB.

By then it was 15:30 and the sun was getting noticeably lower in the sky, the pine trees around the summit were sufficiently tall and thick to cast quite a cold shadow over me and my equipment.  So after making all the contacts that seemed possible I packed everything up and descended to the car with 995 points on the virtual scoreboard.  All was ready for the coming Sunday and the activation that would seal the deal for the MG award.