W5RJD Summit on the Air (SOTA) Activations

I wanted to write about the gear I use on summits now that I’ve had a little experience with what works and what doesn’t.  I am still fine-tuning things but I’ve settled on a basic set of gear that seems to cover all the situations I have run into.  Note, I generally do drive up summits and relatively short (6 miles one way or less) hikes, and I would modify this list accordingly if I were doing longer hikes and/or overnights and backpacking style trips. I keep most of this gear in plastic bags to keep it dry, especially if I do something stupid like let my pack fall off into a river.   Some of the more important items like the radios I double bag.   I label the outside of the bags so I know what goes in it.   This is very helpful when you are packing up so you don’t lose something that fell on the ground or under a log while you were operating. Of course, the most important thing for any SOTA activation is being able to make contacts!   I carry both HF...

A day of fun with Peter (WB6POT) and Scott (KN6KHV) - three summit activations on the same day, with time for lunch. It's been getting harder and harder to find spare time to go out on summits lately because Covid restrictions are loosening and all of my free time is starting to get taken up by my other major interests that I've had to put on hold through the pandemic.  My other two main passions, scouting and music, are becoming a larger part of my life these days.  But, I managed to scrounge up a free Sunday for Peter and I to go to some summits.  We are starting to run out of really close-in summits, so we're having to look away from San Jose a bit to find ones that aren't an all day hike.  There's only a couple of summits in the San Francisco area, so we decided to do a triple play. A friend from a local repeater, Scott, KN6KHV also wanted to tag along and see how SOTA activations are done.  He's a recently licensed tech who likes to dabble in a lot of diffe...