I accompanied Andrew Moseley VK1AD on this trip to two summits. I had never activated at Mt Perisher before so this was a new unique for me.

The road trip from Canberra to Cooma and then through Jindabyne to the foot of Mt Perisher was fairly quiet early in the morning and we made good time. Parking near the foot of the Eyre ski lift we set off up the slope using the track under or near the ski lift as our route. The climb was steady and relentless and it took me an hour to get to the top of the lift run. Then we wound our way through the rocky top to reach the trig point where we arranged our antennas and equipment.

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Andrew M had brought his station ready to operate on 144 MHz and 1296 MHz SSB. Within a few minutes he had qualified the summit on both bands, with contacts northwards to Canberra, eastwards to Rod vk2twr at Nimmitabel and ENE to Batemans Bay on the NSW coast with my brother Chris VK2DO on both bands at good signal levels. I also logged contacts with enough of these to qualify the summit on both bands.

On HF I made contacts on 3.5 MHz cw with stations in NSW and Victoria and on 18 MHz cw with Fiji, Japan, USA and New Zealand. Propagation on the usual bands of 7 and 14 MHz was not allowing the usual mid range contacts.

While on Mt Perisher we were also called by Drew VK1FLEX who was at Mt Kosciuszko, just a bit further south of our position.

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As we wanted to activate the second summit we decided to descend to the car, stop at the cafe for a welcome coffee, then set off for Cooma again.

The Peak is located about 20km east of Cooma not far from Nimmitabel. There is a communications facility next to the trig and several towers bristle with microwave dishes and UHF antennas.

On site near the trig, I set up my HF gear and antenna while Andrew set up his 144 and 1296 station. One of the contacts we wanted to make was with Dave VK2JDS near Bathurst on 1296 MHz. After trying for a while on SSB it seemed like it was not going to work, the signal level just wasn’t good enough, so I plugged in my key and tried him on CW. Eventually we received a report and ours was confirmed, so it was a contact, albeit shaky.

The contacts on HF were much easier by comparison but the 1296 contact was the one I remember best.

Finally we packed up and headed back up the Monaro Highway to Canberra.