Last year was my RaDAR Rally debut, with eight pre-planned spots and tight timing down to a couple of minutes across the four-hour run. If anything it was a little too well-planned. So this year I decided to head to a new park I’d never been to before, hike around, and see what happened.

GB-6612 Hurn Forest is a new POTA park that’s recently been added, and since it’s well within 20 miles of home, that put it on the hit-list for my POTA challenge this year. It’s definitely big enough to wander around for four hours, and has plenty of space in various spots for at least the a vertical antenna, making it ideal for RaDAR Rally. As an extra bonus this year, my logging assistant (and occasional CQ-caller) was along for the ride too.

We kicked off around 1445 local time, 1345 UTC, somewhat later than planned. Just down from the car park was a clearing just big enough for us to set up, and as usual for quick set-ups and pack-downs, we were running the JPC-12 vertical from my Yaesu FT-891 at 100 Watts.

As per the rules of RaDAR Rally, it was five QSOs, then on again, following the line of pylons down the edge of the forest, before striking out across it between spots two and three.

It was slow going on the radio today. Although the solar conditions looked good, there were a lot of spots around the continent that I really should have been able to make contact with, but couldn’t. And calling CQ was equally slow; unlike last year where a “CQ RaDAR CQ POTA” was met with immediate interest, this time around it regularly took five minutes or more to get a contact.

Eight setups was definitely going to be out of the question today, with or without a planned route. Four spots took us just over halfway down the forest, and after that we decided to loop back around and head back towards the north again.

In the end, we made it through six spots in three hours and 40 minutes, and decided we weren’t going to push it and try to find a seventh.

Our activation spot grid references and points scored (assuming my maths is right!) were:

1. IO90bt86: 2 POTA + 3 normal QSOs = 7 points
2. IO90bt95: 2 POTA + 4 normal QSOs (3 scoring) = 7 points
3. IO90bt93: 2 POTA + 3 normal QSOs = 7 points
4. IO90bt82: 5 normal QSOs = 5 points
5. IO90bt91: 1 POTA + 1 SOTA + 3 normal QSOs = 7 points
6. IO90bt83: 1 POTA + 5 normal QSOs (4 scoring) = 6 points

That’s 39 points, x6 for the 6 deployments, for a subtotal of 234, plus 3x5 for the 5 non-motorised transitions, so our final total is 249 points.

Sadly our timing and a lack of RaDAR participants in Europe meant there were no RaDAR-to-RaDAR contacts for us today, and with the bands seemingly in poor shape there were no intercontinental contacts either.

However, yet again RaDAR Rally delivered a great afternoon of hiking around the forest with some radio thrown in too!

Many thanks to our contacts this afternoon, and the RaDAR Rally folks for organising of course. See you on the air next time!