The weather forecast for the day was sunny but windy, which for this time of the year is normal, especially in KZN, the question was which summit should we tackle, as most of the summits are around 2 hours plus travel, time, from our QTH. we were privilege to have Louis ZS5LS with us, this was Louis’s second activation, we choose Cunningham Castle ZS/KN-202, but we would first need to get permission from the land owner Carl Seele, permission was granted so the wheels were in motion, we picked louis up at 06.00 for our trip to the summit, on our way we discussed the possibility of activating a second summit if time permitted, that would be ZS/KN-262 which was about 45min drive from where we were. We arrived at the base of the summit which is situated where the old MINERVA Museum was, which has moved to a new location, the access to the summit was rocky but not to bad, once we summited we quickly set up the station and started calling CQ
The 40M band conditions in general were not to bad with contacts in div 6,5,4,3and V51 I was lucky to make a contact with ZS2BK via the ISS on board repeater whch was fun in its self, As 60m has become so popular, I decided to add 60m to our linked dipole by adding an additional 3,2 meter of wire each side, to our present dipole antenna, I decided that this would be the best time to test out the additional frequency added to our antenna, the results were good which resulted in a contact with Pieter ZS6XT who gave me a 5/9 report
While Louis and I were sorting the links on the antenna Adele was checking the log entries and planning our rout to the next summit, not forgetting to take photos of the plant life which we find so different on each of the mountains we summit, if we cant identify the flowers we ask Mervyn ZS5QI who has an amazing knowledge on plant life
We could see that there had been a fire on the top of the summit as most of the grass had been burnt, making way for the new grass and some flowers starting to shoot out again, showing new life.
We packed the station, and decide to try and leave the mountain by a different rout once we reached the Ute, although the GPS did not show us much about the track which we followed, after about 6k/m we were in front of a locked gate so back track it was, Once we reached the main road the Garmin and Google maps were in conflict with each other, we decide to go with GOOGLE maps on our phone, which took us on a round tour of the country side, twice we had to back track before we eventually found a bush track which took us close to the activation zone. We reached the beacon where set up the station. During our activation we were Rudi ZS6RRB very first contact after he had received his licence.
We hope to make contact with you all for our next summit enjoy and stay safe