I’ve had an interest in 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.

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, the number of contacts gradually increased over the trip. To make up the numbers I put up the trap dipole and made 12 more contacts on various HF bands. There was a lot of interest shown by tourists 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, it cleared up later in the day and I later found out the John 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 that would sell me a LIPO charger. 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 their tool shop counter to drill holes in the conduit.

Summits 3, 4 and 5 – Saturday 25th April

Warren ZL2AJ had answered my original enquiry about summits to activate and 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.