The sunrise over the sea is alway beautiful as was the case Saturday 25 May when we set off to activate Mpongweni ZS/KN-195 which is1591 meters ASL a 4 pointer
Our route took us on the R620 up to Pennington where we turned off to Ixopo, the road in general is not bad although when approaching the smaller towns you need to keep your eyes open for the speed humps which have no painted strips or markings left on them, making it difficult to see them until you right on top of them.
Although Mpongweni’s co-ordinates were in the GPS we still ended driving to dead end forest roads, after driving around for close on two hours we decided to back track to the main road where our GPS and Google Maps had decided to part ways, it was the wrong decision to go with the Garmin, Google Maps although not totally accurate had us the right track. we soon saw the look out tower in the distance but were unable to find the access road. After a lot of frustration we decided to stop at one of Mondi’s stockpile yards, we were soon on the correct road which was over a dam wall, once over we started to climb up on the west side of Mpongweni, after about 45 minutes we reached the point from where we had to start walking, the distance from where we parked to the summit was about 300 meters if you don’t mind damaging your vehicle you could drive to the top, big rocks and covered with long grass in most places.
once we were on the top some 4 hours after our planned activation time we setup our station and started calling, we started on 40M where 4 contacts, were made, signals ranging between 5 5 and 5 7, we then tried 20m with no response after which I went to 30m and made a contact with Neels ZS1OB receiving a 5 7 report in general the bands were not that good at all, we would like to thank all our chasers. The RAE results were published in the morning and we had the privilege of being Marie Grobbelaar’s (ZS4MG) first SOTA contacts.
although we had a difficult time getting to the summit, Adele and still had a fun fulled day, just been out there doing what we like is always great, until next time, enjoy your activations and stay safe
73
Sid and Adele