The organisers of the big amateur radio stations can offer a lot of useful advice about contesting. It’s important to have a comfortable chair, they say, as well as good headphones and a quiet environment. A steady supply of tea and suitable facilities are essential too of course. So with all those things in place, I settled in for this weekend’s CQ WPX cont—

Oh wait, no I didn’t, I did it in a fucking tent. In a gale.

Prescombe Down, GB-0614 for POTA and GFF-0451 for WWFF, has been on the to-do list for a long time. It’s a bit of an unknown one. For a start it’s barely advertised, and there are no signposts pointing to it from anywhere, as far as I could find. I had to resort to DorsetExplorer to figure out the rights of way that let you actually enter the site (even though it’s in Wiltshire rather than Dorset).

Below is the route I took: note that the main by-way (yellow) does not actually provide access to the north end of Prescome Down (green). Approaching the down from the south is also dubious; there is a path through a livestock field there which appears to be a right of way, but the gate looked locked and unmarked on Street View. From the north-east, after 500m or so of walking down the by-way, you turn left through a gate and strike out across two fields, which today were fallow. Then, you take a small path down through a copse of trees, and finally the down opens out before you.

The other reason it’s taken a while to get around to this one is that it’s the furthest of all the parks in my “within 20 miles of home”, and only just scrapes the boundary. My activation spot was something like 19.990 miles from my front door.

Prescombe Down is a huge site, and very steep. In the late spring there are some rare flowers in bloom here, but on a cold, wet and windy March day, it was just me, the hawks drifting on the gusts, and the pheasants calling from the nearby fields.

I was on a tight schedule here, having misjudged the walk from my parking spot to the down as being around 15 minutes—in truth it was close to half an hour—so I had no time for exploring today. Once inside the park boundary, I set up my equipment at the top of the steep slope, and got on the air.

Now the wind today was a solid force 5 or 6 and must have been gusting nearly 8, the wind-chill brought the feel of the temperature down to around 5 Celsius, and the constant sprinkle of light rain didn’t help either. I’d brought my pop-up shelter, which hadn’t seen much use since last September, and it came in very useful today. It is loud in the wind; I’m not sure whether it’s an improvement on wind noise straight into the microphone or not. But it did help keep me warm and dry at least.

I used the Sotabeams Tactical Mini pole today with a 40m dipole antenna. I wasn’t sure it was going to hold in the wind, but with some tactical guying it did survive the activation. I’d brought the JPC-12 along as well in case I needed a sturdier alternative, but in the end I didn’t need it.

This being the weekend of CQ WPX SSB, one of the year’s biggest contests, there was no space on the 40m band for a “CQ POTA, CQ WWFF”. Instead I went for my usual tactic on weekends like these, and just joined in the contest, giving the right exchange and working my way slowly up the band. As I have already mentioned, I was pushed for time here, so once I had 10 QSOs for the POTA activation I stopped there. When it’s all added up it was nearly an hour of hiking for just 15 minutes on the air, but I’m happy with that—it’s been a while since any of my activations involved a “real” walk.

Thanks to all my contacts this afternoon, and best of luck in the contest. Catch you on the air next time!