SOTA Team News

We are not going to the mountains this weekend. We have decided to be chasers. Sometime soon we will just have a mountain top exploration to determine what mountains we want to activate next.

Our Team has decided and invited the KTARC to participate in 1 day field days through out the year. We will pick some Saturdays throughout the year to conduct these operations. We will also pick parks that are accessible by all participants. It will  be fun.

The guidelines for these 1 day field days are as follows:

•  Hours:  9:00 am to 3PM. You can come earlier or stay later or do both.
• You must bring all your own equipment.
• Operate QRP on battery power
• Bring your own snacks and food
• You can work all bands, all modes for which you are licensed
• Make as many contacts as you are able
• Learn from others about equipment, techniques, etc.
• Learn how to be prepared for future emergency operations

I look forward to these ops.

We will continue to pursue activating SC mountains as SOTA operations.

Keep your signal strong and clear!

Sassafrass Mountain Activation

Saturday, October the 8th, was a beautiful day to activate Sassafrass Mountain. The weather was a perfect fall day. As I sat on the Summit Overlook with my FT 817 and Buddiepole rigged for 40 meters working 5 stations before the big guns working contests took over my frequency, I viewed the beautiful mountains, lakes and blue haze.

My friends, Gil KS4YX, Steve W4SLT, Steve WA5KSC, Sue KJ4DLP and Chase KJ4LXC all had a great time as we worked stations from around the world on 10 meters, 40 meters, 20 meters and 2 meters.

I can tell you for sure that an antenna analyzer makes life a lot easier when tuning up antennas!

I learned a lot about how to prepare and execute a SOTA operation and look forward to many more.

We are Official

The Upcountry SOTA Expedition team is official and our Alert has been posted to the SOTA Alert site. All our frequencies etc. are posted. We will have a review posted of our experience once we have compelted the expedition. We hope to work may stations.

Pre-Epedition Meting

We have had our final pre-epedition meeting and it seems we are green and go! The wx looks like it will be very nice. We have six members joining the expedition. We hope to not only activate Sassafrass Summit, but also get a lot of points working QRP. I hope that we make a ton of contacts. Most important of all we will have fun!

Talk to you from the summit!