Pine Mountain, W6/NS-331

Activated 2020-08-08

Posted 2020-08-09

A quick activation of Pine Mountain, W6/NC-331. Pine Mountain is a 1372' peak in Marin County, on a popular mountain biking route I've ridden many times.

This activation was mostly intended as a shakedown ride for integrating bicycles with SOTA. I'm interested in using bikes to get to (or close to) peaks without private vehicle access, so I've been thinking about how to carry a backpack with radio gear on the bicycle.

I figured Pine Mountain would be a decent test. I know the road well, it's only a few miles from parking, and it would be a moderately steep, rough, and challenging ride on a loaded bike.

Over the past few weeks I've set up my old touring bike for radio-hauling duty: I geared it down, put on some flat bars, installed some knobby tires. The bike already had an excellent Pass and Stow front rack, made by my friend Matt Feeney.

So, I loaded everything in the car and headed to Fairfax. At the trailhead, I strapped my backpack to the rack and headed out.

The bike worked great! It's a little weird riding with a loaded front rack, you quickly get used to it. It only look 30 minutes or so to get to the peak. The actual peak is a little ways off the road, so I stashed my bike, unstrapped my backpack, and walked the remaining little bit to the proper peak.

I'd given myself enough time to try my luck on the HF bands. Since getting back into amateur radio a year or so ago, I have not made a single HF contact (my home QTH in the heart of San Francisco has an incredible amount of RF noise!) So, I'm anxious to try it every time I get.

I tossed my endfed into a good-looking tree, found a nice operating position, set up the tuner and FT-818, and tuned up for 20m. The band was not in great shape, but I heard random QSOs in the 14.300 zone (including some real drama going on about 14.310, which I quickly tuned away from... jeez guys, keep it to the internet).

I found a quiet area and called CQ and got nothing. I tried for 10 minutes or so, tuned down to 40m and tried a bit more, and got nowhere. I was getting bored so I figured I'd move to 2m, which is very active locally these summer weekends.

Another goal of this activation was to get comfortable spotting myself via APRS. My activation of Butt Mountain would probably have gone a bit smoother had I been able to spot myself, so I resolved to learn how to use APRS2SOTA, and this was the my first attempt at using it. Before heading to 2m, I sent a quick self-spot, and was amused when SOTA goat alerted me (over the solid Verizon signal) of my own presence.

Within 5 minutes of my first call, I'd gained 4 contacts and activated the peak. My thanks to K6VAC, K6DJV, N6VN, and KM6MRU for the very quick contacts. I was particularly amused to chat with K6DJV, who I hear all the time hanging out on the top of Mt. Diablo.

Since the activation went so quickly, I decided to play around on HF a bit longer. Back on 20m, I heard another SOTA station calling and tried repeatedly to raise him, to no avail. I'm going to need to try harder to make HF work for me. I'd really like to get comfortable receiving CW, which seems like the particularly stylish way to do SOTA. My only CW QSO was back in high school as KC6QDU, at a solid 5 wpm.