This January Contest the Arizona SOTA Association (W7A) had 22 portable operators on 15 different summits on the air Sunday morning. Most of the summits activated were in the Phoenix Metro area, but a few were more remote, like south of Tucson, and near Yuma.

I started hiking up my summit at 6:15 AM (1315 UTC), flashlight in hand, with a 40 pound backpack and a bundle of Yagi antennas for 50, 144, 223, 432, and 1296 MHz.  The hike was 1.3 miles one way. I managed to awaken group of coyotes on the way to the summit. I also learned that taking a movie in the dark just ends up being voices in the dark. DOH!

I arrived on the summit at 7:03 local time, well before sunrise, and it was really nice to be able to photograph/experience the sunrise from the mountain top. I set up my station and the five Yagis, most on a 13 foot mast. The station itself consisted of an FT817 and a few HT's. It turned out that most of the other SOTA stations were on the air by 8:00 AM or so.

My first contact was at 1452, and my last contact was at 1957, so Five hours and five minutes on the air. In that time I managed to make 155 contacts with my 5 watts or less set up. The activity was spectacular on all of the bands up thru 1296, with some big pileups on every band at times. I had never experienced a 1296 pileup until this year. Between the SOTA ops, the VHF Contest Rovers, and the home contesters it was pretty much complete chaos for the whole five hours I operated.

My best DX was DM22 (Yuma, AZ) on Two Meters (155 miles), but my best contact was on 1296 where I had a contact to DM42 (South of Tucson) over 120 miles on 1 watt!

I never heard anything out of state on any band, and all of my contacts were via SSB or FM. I ended up working 14 of the SOTA summits that were activated Sunday morning, making 34 summit to summit contacts, two of them on 1296 MHz.

The SOTA stations made about 839 contacts during the contest.

Anyhow, a great time was had by all. Hope to do it all again next January.

73

Pete

WA7JTM/QRP/SOTA Portable

DM33