N1CLC: 2020-04-19 Hill 1940 & a K6MXA Meetup

After breakfast this morning I got a notice from HamAlert that Jamie, N6JFD was on a CA summit, so I went up to my office / radio room to chase him. I did eventually get a contact with Jamie but while I was doing that, I noticed that John, K6MXA, a San Diego local, was on a summit too,. He and I chase each other and have gotten quite a few summit-to-summit contacts as well. John was up on W6/SC-297. When I looked it up I realized that I had looked at that a few times but wasn’t sure how to get up there. I called John and he gave me the tip I needed. I sat down at AllTrails and got to work creating a map.

This peak fit my criteria for a summit to do during the ‘rona shutdown, not popular, not a public park area, and since it wouldn’t be popular, it wouldn’t be shutdown or full of people. The more I thought about it, the more I figured I better get out to the car and get a summit in today. As a bonus, it’s also one that I haven’t done before, making it my 81st unique summit.

There is a designated trail between a couple of homes there and it worked out well. Rather than hug the property boundary I went a bit down the hill before turning east. My bushwhack was a lot worse than it had to be. Once I found the trail, it was a medium up and down trek. (see my route here).

It was a cool overcast day. The sun came out for a bit and it did warm it up for the climb to the top but not bad. When I was just coming around a rock at the top, I hear someone say “hello”. Up to this point I hadn’t seen a sole. It was John! He was still up on the summit. Because his condo isn’t really suitable for amateur radio, he really uses his time on the summit to get a lot of contacts, try different bands and chase other summits as well as Parks On The Air. He was just packing up when I arrived. We were both pretty surprised and it was fun talking about SOTA and our adventures (keeping our physical distance of course.

As I was setting up, John called me on the VHF HT on his way down to give me my first contact for this summit. Because he and I both activated this summit and chased each other while we were up here, we can log the “complete”.

The Corona shutdown has keeped a lot of chasers out of the game so when you do activate a summit, you get quite a pileup. I started on 20m CW and quickly had a pileup. The slack group gave me three more contacts for my “activation” to get points and there were a lot more after that. I jumped over to 40m and picked up a summit-to-summit with Josh and a few more contacts. I tried SSB for a bit but really didn’t get much there. It’s tougher on SSB with 10 watts, plus Sunday afternoons are slower.

The trip off the mountain went well and it was enjoyable. I chose a better path back and stayed out of most of the brush. It was great to get out of the house and get my hiking legs working as I prepare for another long week in the chair working from home.

I hope everyone out there is doing well and we can get back to business as usual soon.

Contacts

Date:19/04/2020 | Summit:W6/SC-297 (1940) | Call Used:N1CLC | Points: 1

Time	Callsign	Band	Mode	Notes
02:01	K6MXA	144MHz	FM
22:00	K6MXA	144MHz	FM
22:04	W0MNA	14MHz	CW
22:10	W0ERI	14MHz	CW
22:13	K6ARK	14MHz	CW
22:14	NW7E	14MHz	CW
22:15	N5OLA	14MHz	CW
22:19	KD0YOB	14MHz	CW
22:21	WD4CFN	14MHz	CW
22:22	K4MF	14MHz	CW
22:23	N4EX	14MHz	CW
22:25	KE6MT	7MHz	CW
22:28	WU7H	7MHz	CW
22:31	W7RV	7MHz	CW
22:34	K6HPX	7MHz	CW
22:36	WU6X	7MHz	CW
22:38	KD7WPJ	7MHz	CW
22:40	AB6SO	7MHz	CW
22:41	K6CIM	7MHz	CW
22:42	NS7P	7MHz	CW