Out on a munro in Scotland, Glas Maol, GM/ES-012, and doing some more 13cm microwaving. This time managing 142 km summit to summit! Plus 250 km 2m FM S2S QSO to the Lake District, and across to the Isle of Skye.
I made another video too!
Look mum I’m a YouTuber now…
Mowing the lawn: You’re doing it wrong.
QRPer.com: Thomas’, K4SWL, QRP radio blog, with many guest posts. Plus his write up of our outing.
GeoLibra - amazing free GIS software
pub.solar: Free online services, like Matrix, Nextcloud, git
disroot: Another place providing free online services like email, chat, serach, git, etc.
Starboard: A terminal that's just always there, not summoned, not dismissed. Starboard lives permanently beside your macOS Dock
Textlog: An open-source, minimalist social network for sharing 280-character notes, following people and hashtags, and joining conversations.
https://romm.app/ - Self hosted rom manager and player
Lubelogger - Self-Hosted, Open-Source, Web-Based Vehicle Maintenance and Fuel Mileage Tracker
Dirty Little Zine - Design an 8 page zine in this web app.
Hammer - Write your novel. Free, offline, plain text.
Antra - make your own music library from stream sources
Superfile - fancy terminal file manager
The best ft4/ft8 digital mode iOS app
We spent a week on Arran, a family favourite holiday destination. As it’s a family trip, radio and hill walking takes a backseat, but we did plan one outing. My daughter and I would do Mullach Buidhe (GM/SI-027) on the west side of the island, an 8.5 km round trip from Pirnmill - with a convenient corner shop for a suitable reward afterwards.
Weather in the week has been mixed but it was meant to be a nice dry afternoon, although quite windy.
The walk starts off going through some trees and ferns before coming out into a vast, and wet, grasslands. We made our way up the eastern ridge, with the intent to do the summit then come back down the western ridge to form a loop.
Unfortunately, at around 500m the wind was absolutely relentless and a struggle to walk it. After a little way and knowing it was another 200m+ to ascend, I decided it wasn’t a good idea to continue and so we turned back. We were maybe only 600m from the summit, but it’ll be there next time. It was a squelchy walk back, but the views were still good. We could see the three paps of Jura in the distance.
Not wanting to miss out on some radio time, I decided to setup on the beach in Blackwaterfoot. This happens to be in two POTA parks, GB-1447, Arran coastal way, and GB-4447, Arran Geopark (which seems to cover the entire island).
40m was pretty rough, and interestingly my 41’ random wire didn't tune on 20m - I guess the beach ground is different than a hilltop - but I had another antenna with me and used that counterpoise. However, the best band was 17m, with several US stations and a P2P with a couple on holiday in Trinidad and Tobago! I could hear Uruguay strongly on 15m, but they had many callers so I wasn’t going to be heard with my 10W from the KX2.
Aside from these phone photos, I only took film with me on this holiday…we will see how that decision turns out!
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