Another sunny afternoon on another heath, as Spring comes slowly to life all around me.

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know what to expect from GB-0157/GFF-0101 Holt Heath: heather, gorse, birch trees, sandy paths, and marshes. But now there are flowers, and the first bees, and birdsong that never stops, under a bright sun and a blue sky that goes on forever.

A lone tree on the heath

Heathland is the natural state of the place I call home; it was here before we were, and with any luck it will be here after we’re gone. The more time I spend here, the more connected I feel to it—something in the back of my mind reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s apprentice witch Tiffany Aching and her connection to the chalk downs she calls home. This is my home; heather and gorse and a sandy path leading down to the sea. I was born here, and I’ll die here. I am the heath, and the heath is me. It’s magic, of a sort.

View southwards from Bull Barrow

The small northern section of the heath rises slowly to its highest point at Bull Barrow, a Bronze Age earthwork where a crossroads of paths meet. The southern section of the heath beyond the road is much larger, and more open, with a huge bowl of lowland hundreds of metres across. Compared to the dense gorse and well-trodden tracks of the northern section, it seems there as if you are staring out across the great American or African plains, rendered in miniature in the Dorset countryside.

Today I explored only a small section of Holt Heath’s expanse: a walk from the road up to Bull Barrow, then down to the south-east, under the houses, where aerial imagery showed some odd patterns that I was determined to check out for myself.

Alien crop circles?

The answer is of course probably not aliens, unless they chose to use a digger. But somebody made these, scraping off the topsoil and dumping it next to the excavated area, revealing the pale sand underneath. My first thought was firebreaks, but they’re not continuous across the ground, or wide enough to stop embers floating across in the wind. And the circles are even more confusing.

The cleared sections from ground level

Although they didn’t provide answers, they did provide a good place to set up a portable radio station. It’s getting close to nesting season for a number of ground-nesting birds which call our local heaths their home, and as such I wanted to avoid stamping around in the heather as much as possible. These oddly cleared sections provided an ideal place, while also being so out-of-the-way that I didn’t see another person during the whole three hours. Just me, my kit, the wide brown plains, and the voices of 101 strangers.

Wait, 101?

Yes, this weekend was WWFF’s “12.5 year anniversary”, and the goal for activators was to get 100 QSOs in the log. As it turned out, this would take the better part of three hours, with the afternoon turning from bright and warm to a definite chill as the sun dropped and the wind picked up.

My coil-loaded vertical antenna hard at work

I started on the 20 metre band around 1400 UTC, where 100W and just over an hour netted me 54 contacts in good conditions. Once the pile-up tailed off, I switched to 10 metres, but I found it very hard going. I tried to call into a couple of stations I could hear including ET3AA in Ethiopia, but I couldn’t break through the pile-up they had going. Nor could I hear any of the few North American POTA activators on the band. Looking at the MUF map showed poor conditions Stateside, with 28MHz resolutely above the MUF. Spring brings many good things, but it does look like we are starting to lose transatlantic propagation on 10m in the European afternoon.

A CQ call netted a grand total of 1 QSO on the 10m band with Gran Canaria, and at that point I thought about packing it in. I’d exhausted 20, 10 was useless, and I didn’t really have an effective setup for anything else. I had 55 in the log, making it already one of my more productive activations. But that elusive WWFF award for 100 QSOs this weekend hung beyond my reach. Maybe I should have started sooner? Maybe I should have activated on the Saturday as well?

But I had my thermos of tea, a nice view, and nowhere to be in a hurry—why not go back to 20m and finish the job?

There are worse spots for a cup of tea and a chat (or 46 very brief, protocol-heavy chats)

The next 90 minutes were slow going, a mixture of making CQ calls with intermittent responses and a bit of hunting other portable stations. If anything the second half was more interesting than the first, producing three more QSOs with the USA as well as YB3RPS in Indonesia and HBØ/HB9FXF in Liechtenstein. But it certainly did tail off, and by the end I was scanning around the band looking for any QSO, having exhausted all the POTA, SOTA and WWFF spots I could hear.

But by 1645 I had made it. With the sun descending slowly into cloud, a chill wind picking up, and 101 contacts in the log, it was time to go home. And while Dorset’s heathland feels like home deep in in my heart, I had dinner to cook and a family to go back to, in the suburbs they built on the heath a hundred years ago.

Map of contacts from the activation

Many thanks to my contacts this afternoon, all 101 of you—and see you on the air next time!