N1CLC: 2020-06-27 Noble Mountain

I decided to head up to my cabin and work from there since the coming week is a short one given the fourth of July holiday. The weather is absolutely unreal right now. Highs of about 73 with a light breeze. The house is at 8,300’ so that helps. I was here last month by myself for 10 days and I activated 20 summits in 9 days of hiking. I had a great time. I really wanted to see how many I could comfortably activate in a short amount of time. This trip I have a minimum of 3 summits that I wanted to do, and possibly a couple of others in New Mexico that have never been activated.

I headed over to Noble Mountain which I can see from my cabin and setup in the activation zone. I saw three deer on the way up the mountain. The top is pretty flat so you basically drive into the AZ and then decide where you want to setup.

Today is ARRL’s Field day, where hams get together and setup in the field and work to see how many contacts they can get across any band and any mode. This year it was super busy. Given the COVID-19 situation, hams couldn’t setup large operations in parks and other outdoor venues like they did last year but it didn’t seem to slow them down. I was wondering if I’d even be able to activate given how busy it was so I packed the Yaesu 891 100 watt radio and the chameleon multi-band antenna for the trip.

I started out on 17 meter and was able to entice a few chasers using CW. I did a little summit chasing myself although it was very difficult. Because the bands were so packed, a few summit-to-summit contacts were trying to work in between, under and over the big stations in the contest. I remember one chase where the station was mixed in with at-least three other stations. This is common because if a station can’t hear you, they think the frequency isn’t in use so we had a lot of other hams come blasting in right on top of us. Because of the frequency shifts just a tad, you can generally pick out the station you want. Once you hear the operator call CQ with their callsign and sometimes say SOTA, you know which one it is and can get to work. Packing 100w helped but it was still tough. I tried to get in the pileup on SSB but even with 100w and sitting on a mountain top I still had to sit in the scrum a long time to get to make the contact. I’m not complaining however. This is a cool anual even and I think it’s great how many stations setup on battery power and get on the air. Every SOTA activation is field day for me so it’s not that novel.

My operating position was tucked into a grove of small aspen and pine so I had shade and it was about as good as it gets for a lazy afternoon. I was on the summit for about 2 hours and then packed up and went back to the house. I didn’t want to miss sundowner time. :)

Contacts

Date:27/06/2020 | Summit:W7A/AP-007 (Noble Mtn.) | Call Used: N1CLC | Points: 10

Time	Callsign	Band	Mode
18:58	KD0ETC	18MHz	SSB
19:02	NS7P	18MHz	SSB
19:04	K6KM	18MHz	SSB
19:05	N6RND	18MHz	SSB
19:12	AB6SO	18MHz	SSB
19:15	W6JMP	18MHz	SSB
19:16	WI6XG	18MHz	SSB
19:31	K0SSK	14MHz	CW
19:34	N9XG	14MHz	CW
19:41	NS1TA	14MHz	CW
19:50	W5BOS	14MHz	CW
19:51	N4EX	14MHz	CW
19:52	K6QCB	14MHz	CW
19:53	NW7E	14MHz	CW
19:56	WW7D	14MHz	CW
19:57	K7DJL	14MHz	CW
20:02	W6JP	14MHz	CW
20:10	KJ7LSM	14MHz	SSB
20:22	N8II	14MHz	SSB