Time for some more catch-up on the blog and SOTA logs.

On Saturday October 20th Ben (N2BEN, left) and I (NG0R, right) drove from our home in central Minnesota to eastern South Dakota to activate W0/ES-002 as part of the Summits on the Air (SOTA) program. There are not many SOTA peaks in the central portion of the US... so for us "flat landers" it generally means a road trip if we want to activate a summit.

Back story: Earlier this fall Ron KC0JQO mentioned that there were some peaks in central and eastern South Dakota. One of those peaks is about about 150 miles away or aka: within a single day drive for a round trip expedition. A couple of weeks after that I started to research the W0/ES-002 location in detail. I spent about 4 hours across two days trying to track down if it was public or private property. The officals in Roberts County and the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe were great to work with over the phone. After much checking the location is on indian property but it is considered open for public visits. The info from Google Maps is very accurate and will get you right to location. Unless it is extremely muddy you should have no problem accessing the site in a car or a two wheel drive vehicle. It is the largest hill that you will see on the horizon as you approach it for 30-60 miles. There are no trees, shade, or shelter. Welcome to the great plains... it will be windy here.

We posted our operating times and frequencies on the SOTA Alert website and on several of the Internet mail reflectors so that people would have some idea of how to track us down. I also had APRS running via RF from the truck and via the Internet on my phone. I had spotty access to the Internet so I also tried to self spot to the DX packet cluster to get some of the initial traffic going.

This was our first SOTA outing with our new Elecraft KX3 radio. We used an 8ah battery, 22 foot push up mast that was guyed to the ground, and 84 foot inverted L antenna with a 16 foor counterpoise. We logged on paper. It was about 40 degrees (F) with a 25mph wind making it pretty blustery since there was no shelter. (Since it was cold I did not take many photos... we focused on operating and being on time.)

We operated for about 90 minutes. 20m (14MHz) was pretty active, 17m (18MHz) was a struggle, and 40m (7MHz) was a bust. We operated exclusively SSB. (In the future we will split our time between SSB & CW as our CW skills improve.) We put 27 QSOs in the log and had a good mix of locations that we work.

Two (2) of the twenty-seven (27) QSOs were SOTA to SOTA QSOs:
NG0R W0/ES-002 ---- W5STR W5A/MA-009
NG0R W0/ES-002 ---- KD9DC W5N/OR-006

Overall it was a very enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. I was happy with the Q count. I was happy with station performance. Ben was impressed at how simple the setup/breakdown was. Ben was impressed how far 5 watts of RF power can travel.

We should have our QSL card order on-site in a couple of days. (I plan to make up custom QSL cards to each SOTA activation in the future.) The first QSL card/request arrived in the mail early this week. The SOTA logs are posted to SOTA database as of this morning.

The table below shows a real basic log in case you want to check to see if you are in the log:

QSO Date	Time	Callsign	Freq	Mode	RST Sent	RST_Received
2012-10-20	19:20	W5SAN	18.161	SSB	59	57
2012-10-20	19:19	KA1R	18.161	SSB	59	44
2012-10-20	19:12	VE3IC	18.161	SSB	57	57
2012-10-20	19:11	VE3XN	18.161	SSB	55	57
2012-10-20	18:57	KB1RJD	14.342	SSB	57	34
2012-10-20	18:56	KB1RJC	14.342	SSB	57	33
2012-10-20	18:54	NE4TN	14.342	SSB	59	45
2012-10-20	18:52	AA0LV	14.342	SSB	59	55
2012-10-20	18:51	N9GOC	14.342	SSB	59	59
2012-10-20	18:49	KD2CKS	14.342	SSB	59	54
2012-10-20	18:46	WG0AT	14.342	SSB	59	59
2012-10-20	18:45	K7SO	14.342	SSB	59	58
2012-10-20	18:44	VE1WT	14.342	SSB	59	57
2012-10-20	18:42	KD9DC	14.342	SSB	59	54
2012-10-20	18:41	W5STR	14.342	SSB	59	59
2012-10-20	18:39	N4EX	14.342	SSB	59	55
2012-10-20	18:38	VA6FUN	14.342	SSB	59	55
2012-10-20	18:35	WD9BSA	14.342	SSB	59	53
2012-10-20	18:34	KI4SVM	14.342	SSB	51	22
2012-10-20	18:30	NS7P	14.342	SSB	59	44
2012-10-20	18:29	KG7E	14.342	SSB	59	54
2012-10-20	18:28	AA0LV	14.342	SSB	59	44
2012-10-20	18:27	KC3RT	14.342	SSB	59	55
2012-10-20	18:21	W0AO/M	14.342	SSB	59	55
2012-10-20	18:20	N0BCB	14.342	SSB	59	22
2012-10-20	18:18	W0MNA	14.342	SSB	59	43
2012-10-20	18:11	AC0BR	14.342	SSB	59	59

73 de NG0R and N2BEN