For this afternoon’s 145 Alive event, I took a gamble and headed to every local ham’s favourite spot, Win Green. I had backup plans in case the summit was already spoken for, but luckily (and I think for the first time) I didn’t see another ham all day, and had the hill entirely to myself. Apart from a few interested walkers, ex-CBers and a couple of excitable dogs, anyway.

In the month that had passed since my first Backpackers contest, I had invested in a 5m telescopic aluminium pole, to hopefully alleviate the frustrations caused by my short and top-heavy camera tripod. 145 Alive from an easy drive-up SOTA summit gave me the perfect opportunity to test it out, and the good news is that despite some hairy 20-25 knot gusts and dubious guy rope pegging in the dry soil, it behaved itself perfectly well.

The same couldn’t be said for the bands, at least in my location. After spending the first half of the event on the FM net run by G3EC at the Royal Signals, I switched over to work M9WWA’s SSB net from Westbury White Horse. Unfortunately I had S7-8 noise right across the SSB portion of the band again, and unlike during the Backpackers contest, it didn’t seem to shift. I made a total of two QSOs on SSB, then went back to the FM net.

Things weren’t perfect there either, as GB1ALV was running a net on the Hog’s Back in Surrey on the same frequency. That meant any time I beamed my antenna east (or west, to some extent) I could hear bits of their net mixed up with ours. However, all in all I managed 17 QSOs on the FM net, including M9SEB, M7GET and (with significant help from the net controller) Paul G7EWY.

Equipment was as usual apart from the new pole: FT-817nd running 5W, and my Arrow Yagi antenna with just the four 2m elements fitted.

We are well over six months into the year, and with those two SSB QSOs, I am at least finally on the SOTA 2026 2m/70cm SSB/CW scoreboard. Admittedly I’m in 47th place, but hey, at least I’m there at last, and more opportunities await over the coming months.

My best DX of the day was with David M0KYN, who despite being a local, joined the net from IO82ka in the Black Mountains, a distance of 135km. I had my fingers crossed for some French or Belgian stations joining the nets based on the tropo forecast, but sadly it wasn’t to be—though if anyone joined the SSB net from far afield, I doubt I would have heard them anyway in those conditions!

Thanks to everyone who spoke to me in the nets today, especially net controllers G2EC and M9WWA. Catch you on the air again next time!