I’ve had an interest in visiting New Zealand for many years but never managed to visit. So I decided this year to make it happen.

Balancing the dates against school holiday pressures on fare prices, my preferred date for this trip was early April, which coincided with the school holidays in both Australia and New Zealand and this meant the cheaper fares were all sold out even in late January when I first started to look at options. I had been seeing videos on youtube of stunning scenery from trains and that all looked pretty good.

In the end I settled for 22 April to 6th May. I wanted to see Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, having made contacts into each area. The train could be used to travel between these cities however on further examination of the schedules, the Auckland-Wellington train only ran on 3 or 4 days of the week, none of which suited my plans to activate summits in each area visited. Then I found that the daily train from Picton to Christchurch stopped running on Monday the 4th of May. As I didn’t want to commit to driving the 600 km approx from Auckland to Wellington, and the air fare was comparable to some of the hire car costs I decided on a flight from Auckland to Wellington, only about an hour and I would not lose summit activation opportunities.

After an uneventful flight from Sydney to Auckland, I collected a hire car near the airport and drove into the city, using google maps on the phone on the seat next to me for navigation.

The activations were planned to be on 144-ssb as the SOTA challenge was for operation on 144 and 432 mhz, ssb and cw, not fm. I took an FT817 for operation on 144 and HF bands, ssb and cw. I took a recently completed trap dipole for 20/30/40m bands and a backup antenna, a linked dipole for 40/30/20/15m and in case of a problem, a T1 tuner that connects to the 817 for band changes. For the 2m band I took a recently built hourglass antenna.

I sent an introductory message to the SOTA mailing list in NZ and received replies from Warren ZL2AJ, Wynne ZL2ATH and Geoff ZL3GA. A good start as that covered the three regions I intended to activate.

I also sent a “join” request to a mailing list ZLVHFcontest at Groups.io. While that list is public so anyone can read it, posting new topics requires membership so I hoped to become a member before my first activation. I did manage to join that group and posted notices about activations for the next fortnight.

Summit 1: Mt Eden in Auckland

This is an obvious activation as it’s so close to the city centre. After parking in the small carpark, I walked up the path to the summit. I found a location next to the path to activate from. As I was erecting the 2m hourglass antenna and raising the mast, the top boom made from 19mm dowel split apart at the hole drilled in the centre. I tried to think of any way to restore it and found a plain lead pencil in my spares box, which combined with some electrical tape, allowed the dowel to be splinted, saving the activation. Contacts on 2m ssb were only three, longest distance was 157km to ZL1AKW. However this was a good start and together with the alerting I used on both sota and the local vhf group, the number of contacts gradually increased over the trip. To make up the numbers and qualify the activation I put up the trap dipole and made 12 more contacts on various HF bands. There was a lot of interest shown by tourists walking past me and I spent some time talking about ionospheric propagation and SOTA.

Summit 2: Pukekohe Hill

Trusting my splint to hold sufficiently for a second activation I drove about 50km down to Pukekohe hill and set up for another similar activation. There was a big tower and building that I suspected would contain QRM sources so I set up some distance before the tower on the side of the road. This time I made 12 contacts, 4 on 144 and one on 432mhz. As I was completing the last contact with JG0AWE on 20m, I became aware that someone was standing nearby watching and listening. The signal from Japan was weak and I remarked on that to the onlooker saying the signal was fading towards the end. “He was” said the onlooker and then I realised it was John ZL1BYZ. We had contacted earlier in the day and I knew he lived near this summit. We had a good chat in the fading sunlight.

For the next day, 24th April, rain was forecast and although it did start raining in the morning in Auckland, it cleared up later in the day and I later found out that John ZL1BYZ and Ian ZL1IM had activated two summits that day. I had found that my backup LIPO battery was not providing enough voltage for the 817 and I found a shop (Hobby City) that would sell me a LIPO charger as I thought mine was not working. I also went to Bunnings and bought a length of 20mm PVC conduit to make a replacement boom for the 2m antenna. I borrowed some tools from Bunnings and used a borrowed drill from their tool shop counter to drill holes in the conduit. I bought a step drill for that purpose as I needed to drill holes of several diameters.

Summits 3, 4 and 5 – Saturday 25th April

Warren ZL2AJ had answered my original enquiry about summits to activate and also offered to take me to three summits this day. With Ian ZL1IM keen to activate new summits we made the trip out to ZL/AK-019 south of Manukau Heads. This was a challenging walk for me and I lagged behind Warren and Ian but fortunately they waited for me to catch up several times. Permission to access this summit was organised by Warren.

Much of the walk up to this summit was in long grass and the final climb was quite steep.

The activation location was above but not far from the ocean below.

The next summit was Manukau Heads, still near the western side of the island. The activation point was right on the border of the activation zone and the antenna was not very high above ground. This time I got only one contact on 2m ssb, ZL1AKW who was 162 km away, but it meant that this summit counted towards my challenge score.

Then we headed towards the east for Klondyke, a comms site apparently owned locally. The owner came up to check on what we were doing and Warren was able to put his mind at ease. I set up the 2m ssb station and this time I made 7 contacts on ssb, including ZL1AKW at 128km, ZL1SKL at 53 km, ZL1TV at 106km, ZL1AN and ZL1KB in Auckland around 50km and ZL1MTH whose grid square I didn’t copy so the contact could not be counted. It was good to see how some activity earlier in the day had translated into more activity in the afternoon, including a mobile in Auckland.

On the 26th I took the plane to Wellington and had a walk around the town centre. The “hotel” I stayed at was in Kent Terrace.

Wynne ZL2ATH collected me from near the museum the next morning and took me to Mt Crawford ZL1/WL-153. This is where things got interesting from a 2m dx point of view. Included in the contacts made were locals ZL2YW, ZL4CZ and ZL2EF and from down south in Christchurch, ZL3RC and ZL3JJ each at a distance of about 300km.

I added some HF contacts afterwards including ZL1KLF and ZL1GA, VK1AD, VK1MA, VK4FNQ, VK3PF, VK1RT and ZL1IM.

We then headed across town to Hawkins Hill ZL1/WL-101 which has a really good outlook to the south and I hoped we would make the longer distance contacts again. After some local contacts we had ZL3JJ, ZL3RC, ZL3NW, ZL3AIC all on 2m ssb running 5w from the 817. This was very pleasing and I planned an activation of another local hill the next day.

The next morning I had some navigational issues getting to the trail head but eventually found myself walking up Makara Hill ZL3/WL-129 arriving around midday, setting up the 2m antenna and making contacts again into the Christchurch area with ZL3RC and ZL3AIC. I heard but was not heard by ZL4ES who was south of Christchurch. After some HF contacts I packed up and walked back down to the car.

Wednesday 29th April