Another Moto-SOTA: The Venerable Mount Wachusett (W1/CR-001)

Are you getting the impression that we have been spending quite a bit of time on our new motorcycles? And what good is a motorized vehicle if you cannot find a way to get it to schlep all of your stuff up a mountain for you? This was about a 120 mile round roundtrip from Boston. We attached rear racks and ziptied on milk crates. That white bag you see is the massive Hyperlyte Mountain Gear Dyneema Porter 70L pack. You may remember seeing them in this post years ago now. For years, they were much too big for us to be terribly useful. But, alas! This year we pulled them out of the basement realizing they were the perfect size to tuck our Aerostitch moto-suits into when we arrived at our destination and desperately wanted out of them. They also kept our radio gear safe and snug for the ride out west.

For this trip, we never ventured very far from the bikes, thus just tossed our gear wherever we could. I quickly got the Chameleon CHA-LEFS-4010 antenna up along the tree line. I have been enjoying this end-fed half-wave antenna.

Everything is old school up on Wachusett today. The cars. The radio (Yaesu FT-891, LDG Z100 tuner, 15ah Bioenno LiFePO4 battery — my very first radio station). The motorcycles (newly manufactured Yamaha TW200s, but virtually unchanged for 40 years). Me.

We made our four contacts for Summits-On-The-Air and got our point. We made our ten contacts for Parks-On-The-Air and completed our activation. We made some extra contacts just for good luck. We stayed on 20M and danced around QSB and QRM. All part of the game.

I was looking forward to the long ride back to Southie. It turns out a motorcycle suits me.

KM1NDY

“You were quicker than they thought…
You just turned your back and walked…”