OK8CDX Czech Tour May 2019 - Day 2

de Phil OK8CDX (G4OBK)continued.....

This was our first full day of our Czech tour when we planned to leave Kourim and travel near to Chotebor and reach our main hotel where we would stay for five nights.  Directly this was a distance of 75 Kms but instead I had planned an itinerary taking in ten easy to reach summits in the OK/ST and OK/VY areas along the way. 

After a visit to a bakery in Kourim for some breakfast snacks we drove out a few miles to OK/ST-086 Krechor and then on to OK/ST-064 Vysoka. I grabbed a bench seat off the road here for my operation on 7 MHz, whilst Victor (OK8VM) went into the woodland to operate on 10 MHz from near the radio mast pictured here:

With a tight schedule planned we spent no more than around 15-20 minutes operating time on each summit, before moving on to the next one. At this time of day the 30m and 40m bands were working well for us. On all summits we set up two seperate stations and operated independently of each other.  When we arrived at our 3rd summit, OK/ST-032 Brezina, we were surprised to find an HF contest site with a caravan sited there and an impressive array of HF aerials - there was even a beverage receiving aerial supported on poles which was around 250 metres long. The contest station was not in use thankfully, so there was no QRM to affect our SOTA operations:

My 5 metre pole with linked inverted vee dipole 40m-30m-20m on OK/ST-032

What a station! Callsign and club name unknown on OK/ST-032

The weather stayed dry and we continued on with our list of summits entering into the OK/VY area. Most summits were non-descript and situated in woodland, such as this one VY-032, Orlik.  Here my KX2 is sat on the trig point, with the pole bungied to the red and white trig pole, that one finds on many summits in the Czech Republic. Victor can be seen setting up in the background about 75 metres away:

Most summits visited were graced with the presence of a radio mast, such as OK/VY-050 Vysoka pictured below (Such a common summit name in Czech, converted to English this is the word high!):

This summit had several ski-tows leading down from the summit and legal road access to the top of it. Having completed my activation on 7 MHz, Victor was still working chasers on 10 MHz so I was able to take his photo (above).  The day stayed dry and after activating VY-050 pictured, we checked in at our hotel (pictured) in the village of Rozsochatec near Chotebor:

Once that was done and we had our room keys, we went back out to activate the last two summits, VY-048 Vizab and VY-046 Fredleruv kopec, before heading for a meal in Chotebor. Not a bad day at all, 10 summits activated with 216 SOTA contacts completed between us. 

Go to: Czech Tour Day Three/Four