Opportunistic.. Sometimes thats what you have to be with this sota caper, especially with a young family and limited time to goat.

I had a pretty urgent overnight work trip to Warrnambool handed to me, and a quick look at sota goat showed me that I would be near at least 2 summits on my journey, depending on how long the task took me, I may be able to activate a hilltop, so i threw the sota backpack in the car and headed off.

I work with RF, and my task was to track/locate and stop some interference that had popped up in our spectrum, causing interference to our network. This is one of the fun aspects of the job I do, waving a yagi around hunting for the noise source, sometimes they can be difficult to find and even harder to turn off, but this one proved relatively straight forward, and once I had discovered it, getting it turned off didn’t take too much effort. *Don’t import gear from ebay because its cheap! it can do this to other networks.

Interference on the left and turned off on the right.

With my allocated task completed. I had some “housekeeping” stuff to do in the town, then had time to head back home, and this gave me a spare ~hour to activate Mt Leura.

Mt Laura is an old Volcano cone just outside the town of Camperdown. I wasn’t sure of the access, and wasn’t sure how easy this would be to work, i only had a small bit of time, so driving through the town, and checking the GPS I saw this summit had easy road access, so I headed up the hill to work it. The main car park is ~5m below the summit peak, and I parked and walked down the access road, that snakes its way down the mountain, around 250m walking sees you below the summit where I turned around and headed back into the activation zone. The trig point has some info boards and a bench where I set up my gear. As i was finishing off the setup, a bike rider arrived, he was a local training for the 3 peaks bike race, and we had a chat about the gear and what I was doing, and about the crazy bike ride he was training for. Warrnambool had been fresh, with a strong sea breeze keeping temperatures in the low 20’s, but Camperdown, being inland was experiencing some of the warm weather we have at the moment, and the warm wind had temps above 30 on the summit, and I had forgotten my hat, it was warm in the sun!

I fired up and spotted myself, then started calling, soon afterwards the band of regular shack sloths replied, and a couple of new people as well, and I handed out some contacts. After working the stations on 40m, i headed up to 20m to try and work some more distant stations without any luck, and as I always do, put out some calls on 50.200MHz with no replays! Packing up and jumping back in the car to continue my trip home. I had been around 50mins all up. Thanks for all who I worked.