N1CLC: 2020-02-29 Stonewall

Today’s mission was to summit Stonewall Peak and collect a few SOTA points. I really wanted to do this as a double with Cuyamaca peak but Cuyamaca is closed during a bunch of construction so we decided to just hit Stonewall. It’s a bummer they couldn’t come up with a way to allow the public to enjoy the summit of Cuyamaca; I’m with Jake and will just blame it on the lawyers. Jake, W6RWS met up with me at my place and we headed up the mountain. I always enjoy hiking with Jake.

We got to the camp ground parking lot at about 0830 local and headed up. This is a very easy 2.1 mile hike and since Cuyamaca is close, there are a lot of people on the trail. It has some beautiful views off the top and is unique as it has metal stairs going up to the rock summit, which has some really nice railing around it for the squeamish.

Jake wanted to use his HT running 2 meter to activate from the peak. He hooked it to a rollup j-Pole antenna and easily activated it. I got a few of the same contacts with my little whip upgrade on my HT but he was killing it with the j-Pole antenna and a Kenwood HD. One of the contacts we got was Mike, KN6HTX and he was pretty excited because he’s new at this and this was his first SIMPLEX (direct radio to radio contact). If not first SIMPLEX, the longest for sure. He was approximately 37.4 miles directly from us up in San Marcos at Palomar College. It was great to hear his excitement and I gave him a quick commercial on SOTA. Hopefully we’ll see him on the mountain tops with his radio soon.

I de-summited a tad and setup my KX2 to work a little HF and do some summit-to-summit chasing. My CW skills sucked as usual but I muddled through 14 CW contacts, some of them summit-to-summit.

All in all, we both had fun playing radio on the mountain, now it was time for Victoria’s kitchen in Descanso to get some carnitas burritos. Mmmmm.

It was a quick summit but fun, and a wow beautiful day.

Contacts

Summit	Date	Time	Band	Mode	Other Callsign	Other Summit	Comment	Is S2S?
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	17:01	144MHz	FM	KD6DCF
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	17:12	144MHz	FM	KN6HTX
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	17:15	144MHz	FM	K6ARK
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:08	14MHz	CW	N9XG	W5T/SB-003		✔
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:18	7MHz	CW	WS0TA	W5N/SI-010		✔
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:25	14MHz	CW	KI6KU
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:27	14MHz	CW	KX0R	W0C/PR-114		✔
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:30	14MHz	CW	WW7D
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:31	14MHz	CW	W0MNA
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:32	14MHz	CW	W0ERI
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:33	14MHz	CW	W6IPA
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:34	14MHz	CW	N4MJ
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:35	14MHz	CW	WU6H
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:37	14MHz	CW	W9MRH
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:39	14MHz	CW	KB5EDR
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:43	14MHz	CW	VA2EO
W6/SC-029	29/02/2020	18:44	14MHz	CW	K7AHR	W7O/CN-090		✔