With a few days off work headed down to Ulladulla on the NSW South Coast, to activate some SOTA peaks and parks. This area was badly impacted by the bushfires last summer, and found the track to Durras Mountain VK2/SC-051 closed. Continued on to Boyne Mountain, VK2/SC-050.
Turned off the Princes Hwy onto Monkey Mountain Rd. Boyne Mountain visible
It looked like the fires may have missed the summit, but I was wrong... Lots of burnt trees. Turned off onto Old Coach Rd and then parked near the road up to the summit. Junction
For comparison the junction in 2015 when I last activated it. Lush and green...
Continued up the road to the summit.
Reached the summit, communication towers. Seemed to have survived the fire well.
Just behind the towers Boyne Trig. Apart from the plastic support for the top disk melting a little survived okay
Name plate, Boyne
From experience knew operating near the towers was bad, lots of QRM... so moved back down the road and set up the dipole, along the road. Not much traffic comes up here.
Looking back down the road
FT857D, on 7.090 Mhz
Conditions on 40 m were poor today. First worked John, VK4TJ, normally a good 59 a weak 51... Then
VK7AW, VK3KTT, VK3MEG, VK5HAA, VK3ACT, VK5HS, VK3DQ, VK3PI, VK3PF, VK3VDX, VK4KC
I tried 80 m at one point to work some of the locals, but despite the Sydney slow morse beacon on 3.7 Mhz being strong no callers.
Final contact VK2YYO who was a strong signal, he was at Bawley Point though only about 10 km away.
Packed up and headed to Ulladulla for the evening.
Nice, I also found QRM quite bad there. Was it much better further down?
ReplyDeleteThere was about an s1 buzzing noise on 40 m. Enough to be annoying and made it hard to copy weak signals. Next time I will drop down the hill a bit further...
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