POTA is ‘Parks On The Air’. You go to a park, deploy antenna and radio transceiver, and to ‘activate the park’ you have then exchanges with at least 10 folks over the air.

SOTA is ‘Summits On The Air’: you go to a mountain summit, and for an ‘activation of the summit’ you need at least 4 connections over the air. I’m in Germany right now, and this is about my first successful SOTA activation. Fits perfectly: I have call signs in both Japan and Germany. My first POTA activation was in Japan, first SOTA in Germany - covering both countries where I feel ‘at home’.

The tech parts are almost unchanged since my descriptions in Starting POTA and optimizing equipment. Only important change: I got a new power bank. To power the QMX+ transceiver, it needs to offer 12V DC via power delivery. After some research, I found a fitting power bank: 12000mAh, weight 243g. Much lighter than the power bank I have in Japan, and still more power than I need for a single activation.

Planning

Just locations in the official databases of POTA/SOTA can be used for activations. From the map on sotl.as I saw that summit Rondell is nearby, about 20km by bike. In a group of 4 we went off, route planning done with OsmAnd on my Pixel9 running GrapheneOS. The route was over quite some rough trails, at one point we had to lift our bikes over fallen down trees. I was the only one on a bike without electrical support, but this was totally doable - the ‘Rondell’ is just 522m over sea level.

Arriving at the Rondell

Funny enough - even though this is classified as ‘summit’, it felt much more like a park! Benches with tables, very nice. Reminded me of K4SWL’s POTA sessions, like this one.

Setting up

At first, we were sitting down at these benches, setting up the equipment. My loop is like this:

• deciding for a band, i.e. 20m or 30m (the QMX+ does 6m-160m, the Comet antenna without extra coil 10m-40m)
• wiring all up, logging into the QMX+ transceiver via USB-C cable, and measuring the SWR of the setup
• adjusting length of the antenna for better SWR, measure again - until SWR is reasonable

The odd thing that day: when I had adjusted the setup to SWR of i.e. 1.3 or 1.5, and then started software ‘wsjtx’, the QMX+ would show an error indicating a very high SWR. Then measuring the SWR again showed it indeed very high - so some conditions I could not identify had changed it in the meantime. I have a cheat-sheet for tuning the Comet HFJ-350.

I moved then away from the benches, to the more open area where I could not sit down while operating. The antenna was no longer surrounded by trees, and ontop of the ‘rondell’ monument itself - this helped. Using an antenna tuner could change this, but would also mean more weight to carry around.

2 of the others left early, heading towards a gas station in Keula. Dad and I stayed another 30min, completing 5 contacts.

Way back

We caught the others at the gas station, and headed back towards Muehlhausen. Towards the end, I had a flat tyre - my dad headed home, got his car and fetched me from a parking lot.

Equipment

Equipment this time:

Corrections? Questions? -> Fediverse thread