Mount Pleasant – Christchurch

Queens Birthday is well known in New Zealand as NZART conference weekend. This year conference was held in Christchurch and it meant of course that on the Monday, Warren made sure that he had time to tick off another SOTA summit and get it into his log.

We got some great views up the top looking out towards the Southern Alps with their dusting of snow as far left and as far right as you could see. Down into Lyttleton and out over Christchurch City its-self. A group of 4 Christchurch HAMs joined us on the hill top and it was good to see Ken and Margaret get up on the air and make an activation of their own, a first for them and all done on a hand held radio we might add – Well Done. Access to the summit is via road / car and is an easily achievable drive with good parking at the top.

It took a while to get on the air for Warren but after a bit of tinkering and fixing a fault in the coax it was all go and he was on the air collecting his contacts, while others keen to learn how SOTA is done watched and took note. If nothing else, Margaret took a shine to Warrens KX3 that fitted nicely in a click clack lunch box and is no doubt saving her pennies to get one for herself. If she wants to put her sammies in the lunch box though she may have to invest in a bigger lunch box.

After “fixing” the faulty coax there were plenty of chasers awaiting on 40m including a summit to summit from Mount Dandenong in VK3. 20m netted a few more and reaffirmed the S2S contact. There were many new chasers that hopefully have caught the SOTA bug that we were pleased to hear. This completes the Mount Pleasant summit for Warren as he has now chased and activated it. (You are deemed to have completed the summit when you have both chased it and activated it). You can check your completes on sota-data by checking view results, my results, my sota complete log.

Another challenge for some (including Warren) is building the activator unique’s. Under view results, activator uniques table, you can see how many summits you have activated. Change the entity to “- all associations -“and click Show. You can then see where you sit on the world stage. Currently with 32 uniques Warren is placed 876.

Lastly we cant forget to show you what you South Islanders have on your doorstep awaiting activation. We are certain there are many summits that will remain un-activated for sometime. There is also a couple of North Island shots in there too, just to prove we do have mountains up here, just in another league compared to our South Island friends. We were lucky with our flights home, clear skies all the way giving us a privileged view of the country from the air.