Glastonbury Tor Activation of HEMA summit G/HSC-006
Glastonbury Tor is our local summit, 158m high. It is 5 meters short of being a Marilyn, because these require a prominence (ie height above surrounding area) of 150m, and the A361 out to West Pennard is 145m below the summit. The Tor is therefore in HEMA - Humps except Marilyns, HuMPs having a Hundred Metre Prominence. The Tor is G/HSC-006 in HEMA
The Tor was very busy this Saturday. It’s quite busy most days
but many people had come to see the impressively lit up Glastonbury Music Festival
I was originally going to chase this activation sitting in the garden with a drink, but unfortunately Matt M3MMZ who was going to activate it couldn’t make it, and another club member suffered equipment failure. So I decided to wing it at the last minute, activating using my Kenwood TH-D7E VHF handheld. I used a Nagoya NA-77 antenna which is longer than the stock rubber duck. My activation lacked ambition, radio-wise. Fortunately I was able to work three members of IoAARC who were in the town, and thankfully Brian M1FFP from Castle Cary saved the day to give me four contacts and an activation.
Stations worked
| Time UTC | Callsign | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 20:12 | G6UVO/M | |
| 20:18 | MX0IOA | |
| 20:20 | M1FFP | in Castle Cary, 8.5 miles away |
| 20:25 | G5FM |
Conclusion
This was a successful activation, but I was lucky to activate it with such an basic setup, three contacts were Club members in the town. I used a Baofeng speakermic with an earpiece plugged into the speaker socket, so that I didn’t blast people with radio noises. However, the wind was 12mph gusting to 25. I used a Rycote fur on this speakermic, which successfully removed the wind noise which was atrocious without. But it did also reduce my modulation, I had not expected this to do that, and probably need to amplify the mic signal to compensate for that. I have used this successfully for SOTA activations to tackle the wind, and it was interesting to get reports of the difference.
While the cover fits the mic, it also covers the PTT. I can operate that through the cover, but lose a lot of the tactile feel, it is easy to think the PTT is stuck on because there is not much travel in the switch, so the return is hard to feel through the cover.
It would have been interesting to see if using an external dipole would have pulled in more stations, but I didn’t have time to get that together and make the 9pm BST slot.