The SOTA RaDAR Trifecta: Grace, Tully, & Prospect Hill

We did it! Three Summits-On-The-Air activations in a single day! Now, don’t get me wrong. We did not pick Everest, K2, and Denali as our destination peaks. In total, we hiked about 6.5 miles, with the hills all within a half hour drive from one another. But our February 13, 2021 RaDAR (Rapid Deployment Amateur Radio) SOTA of Mt. Grace, Tully Mountain, and Prospect Hill was nonetheless a success!

For us, we got an early start, summiting Mt. Grace by noon after a nearly two hour drive from Boston. AA1F would be testing his fancy new four character call sign for the first time. Nellie, our dog, was also along for the adventure. The trail was straightforward, but treacherous, essentially walking up a frozen stream, with the surface slowly melting in the 40 degree sunlight. I am not certain it would have been passable without footware traction devices like Microspikes; a necessary piece of winter gear for all New Englanders in my opinion.

Our kit, which we shared this time, was pretty standard for us: my Yaesu 891, LDG Z100 Plus autotuner, Bioenno 15ah lifepo battery, 50′ RG8X coax, a Radiowavz 20M half-wave endfed antenna, power cord, microphone, Y-ACC control cable, 1.5′ coax jumper, two 50′ lengths of 550 paracord, and our log books.

After watching a recent video on endfed antenna configurations and propagation directionality (The Old Tech Guy), I changed my setup a bit. I usually hoist the balun with feedline high into a tree, with the free end running horizontally or even sloping downward. The Old Tech Guy made a convincing argument that low feedline/unun placement with a taller free end made for more omnidirectionality of an EFHW antenna than horizontal placement.

This idea seemed to pan out from what I typically experience. Often, I notice that there is a certain pattern to my propagation when I run it horizontally, typically pointing in the direction of the free end, as one would expect. For instance, if I set up the unun toward north and the free end toward south, I pick up the South Atlantic Coast of the U.S. from Massachusetts.

However, especially on Tully Mountain with the unun low in the east and free end high in the west, our results seemed different. Our contacts ranged from Europe (France, Germany, Belgium, Norway), to Puerto Rico, to Texas, to California, to the Midwest US, to summit-to-summits in the Southwest US. I know it is anectdotal, and I may model this out soon, but I think the EFHW in a sloper configuration may be the better choice. The video with Belgium, a staton way in my noise that eventually popped up a bit louder, is above.

After a quick convenient store refuel, AA1F, Nellie, and I made it to our final summit, Prospect Hill, as the sun began to set. The road to trail head was muddy and slick, but passable. The walk in is short with a very mild grade — the reason we saved it for last. We quickly deployed and made our contacts. In total, we had 49 QSOs for the entire event. Some of our chasers were even with us for the whole event (that’s you Kansas Superduo W0ERI & W0MNA, and also our local SOTA star N1AW!) We love all you guys! Thanks once again for being there!

de KM1NDY