Posts tagged 'sota'

• My SOTA Gear - November 3, 2016

  I’ve spent the entire year hiking around with my radio participating in Summits on the Air. For the most part it’s been using a little handheld radio with a handheld antenna, but I’ve recently had enough success on HF to be encouraged by the gear I’m using. I thought it might be interesting for other people to see exactly what gear I am carrying with me. And since I spend a lot of time working on lightening my backpacking load, it would be interesting to see how much all this stuff weighs too.

• Finishing the New England 4000ers - October 16, 2016

  On October 15, I headed north to Sugarloaf one more time with Sarah and Rik to finish off the New England 4000ers. I had only three left - Abraham, Spaulding, and Sugarloaf - and they’re all along one ridge so it made sense to do them as one hike. Sarah came along to help with the logistics. I had her drop Rik and me off at the Firewarden’s trailhead and we would then just hike all the way back to the Sugarloaf Mountain Hotel. That would save us having to do any weird out and back stuff.

• Lassen NP day hikes (August 26/27) - September 18, 2016

  After our backpacking trip, we spent the next five days doing much easier day hikes in and around Lassen NP. Sometimes all four of us went, and sometimes it was just one or two people. We saw a variety of things - waterfalls, summits, thermal features, and lava tubes. This post describes the last three full days we spent in the area.

• Lassen NP day hikes (August 24/25) - September 16, 2016

  After our backpacking trip, we spent the next five days doing much easier day hikes in and around Lassen NP. Sometimes all four of us went, and sometimes it was just one or two people. We saw a variety of things - waterfalls, summits, thermal features, and lava tubes. This post describes the first two days worth of activities.

• Backpacking in Lassen NP, Day 2 (August 22) - September 9, 2016

  On day two of our backpacking trip through Lassen NP, Lon and I got up early to do an activation of a peak near our campsite. We then met back up with Sarah at the campsite, packed up, and hiked past several more lakes and through a big burned area, then down through a long valley before hitting Snag Lake. This desolate looking lake is on the east side of the park. We hiked along its shore for a mile or two before reaching our campsite just at its end. Along the way, we also changed our plans for the trip.

• 2015 in radio - December 22, 2015

  At the end of 2014, I wrote down a whole bunch of goals for my main hobbies, in order to motivate myself to do them more often. Since we’re at the end of 2015 now, it’s a pretty good time to look back and see how well I did. Over the past several posts I’m going to do that, one hobby at a time. Since I’m unlikely to do anything with the radio the rest of the year, I’ll talk about that first. I’m also going to mention what I have planned for the upcoming year.

• Fall 2015 hiking roundup - December 9, 2015

  I keep meaning to write in depth about all the hiking I’ve been doing this fall, but two things stopped me. First, I wanted to be able to link to pictures but I want to set up my new photo browser (which means setting up a new server) first. Second, after a couple went by without a writeup the backlog really got big and it became much harder to get the motivation. So instead of doing anything deep here, I’m just going to give real quick recaps of what I have been up to. There’s a lot more planned for the winter so I need to knock out the reports of these to make way for more exciting posts soon.

• Hike and activation of Rose Mountain - October 31, 2015

  I didn’t have a lot of time for a hike on Saturday, because we needed to be down at David’s house in the afternoon to help with antenna raising and passing out candy. Thus I needed to find something local and quick to do. I’m also a little bored of the usual Wapack peaks, so I had to figure out somewhere new to go. For reference, I figured I might as well use the Summits On The Air maps to find somewhere a little more obscure that I could also get some radio done from. Rose Mountain in Lyndeborough fit the bill.

• My first Summits On The Air activation - October 21, 2015

  It’s fun to combine hobbies. Recently, I’d been thinking about doing more portable radio operation and with the heel injury I thought it was the perfect time to get out and take a handheld radio on a quick nearby hike to see who I could contact. Of course, there’s already an organized group that does this, and it’s called Summits On The Air, complete with spotting and awards and rules and lists of peaks. So I joined a few Facebook groups, created a couple accounts, installed SOTA Spotter on my phone, and picked my summit.