11-1-2020, Mount Umunhum W6/CC-052

I haven't bought any portable radio gear yet, and I've never activated a summit before, so I figured for my first attempt I would pick something easy and borrow some gear.  I look out my back yard and can see Mount Umanhum, a peak nearly 4000 feet up overlooking Almaden Valley.  I have been up there only once in my life during a VIP tour before they cleaned up and developed the peak.  Since then, it's been turned into a public viewing area and you can almost drive all the way.  There's just about 150 stairs from the parking lot to the summit.

For radio gear, I turned to my friend Ray, N6DZK, who had an Elecraft KX3 and an AX1 antenna.  I've been looking at the KX2 as the best option for this - and I was very skeptical that the small AX1 would do any kind of a decent job.  Ray had never used the antenna before and was anxious to try it out, so we set the date.

I started learning about how alerts and spots work, what the rules were, and downloaded things like Sota Goat to my phone.  A few days prior, I sent out an alert to SotaWatch.

When we got there, Ray started to unload his gear from the truck but he wasn't feeling great.  It was quite an ordeal for him to hike up the stairs to the summit, but we made it.  We got into the activation zone and started looking for a place to set up.  Sun or shade was the big question, and most of the shade seemed more like little bushes than trees.  It wasn't terribly hot so we chose to use a rock wall in the native ceremony grounds as an operating desk.

The cube in the background can be seen for miles all over San Jose.  It's an old air force radar station.

We took out the KX3 and attached the AX1 and counterpoise and decided how to run it.  Then I hear a "oh crap" from Ray, and it turned out he had left the KX3 power adapter at home.  It took us a couple of minutes to jury rig something to use with his backup 12v power pack, and we set the larger LFP battery aside.  I reached out to my ground support on 146.52 and George, N6NKT stood ready to spot us once we got going.  Ray hit the autotuner and was not happy with the 39:1 SWR until I pointed out he was on 40m and didn't have the coil attached.  After a quick laugh we got tuned up on 14.260 and had George spot us.

Within a few minutes, we had quite a dog pile of chasers.  I went into contest mode and worked them all as quickly as I could because I had no idea how many of them were waiting in line.  We were working Michigan, Kansas, Montana, and a bunch of other states within minutes of getting on the air.  Ray was giddy with how the AX1 was performing.  While working the pile, I heard "Summit Summit Summit!" at about -30 below the pile, so I put the pile on hold to work WU7H on Loser Ridge in Washington State.  It was pretty exciting to get an S2S contact without even trying!

After 20m calmed down I went over to .52 and worked a bunch of locals who were standing by.  I was able to work a station in San Francisco and another in Santa Cruz.  Good views from up there.   I had George spot us on 20m again and we made two more contacts.  As we were about to call it quits, I made a second S2S with KB1LQD on Black Mountain up the peninsula on .52 as he was setting up his gear.  Wow, two summit to summits without even trying!  We packed it up and started the walk down.  All in all we made 25 QSO's in about an hour. 

Ray loved the AX1 performance at elevation.  Seeing it in operation told me it might be worth having for places that you couldn't spread out a wire antenna easily.  The power pack barely registered a dent, so we learned to leave the LFP home next time.

A very successful first activation.   ... Rick W5RJD