Electrifying Sota

Today Sota was special – it was in some kind electrifying – but more on this later.
We started so early that we were sitting in the cable car before it actually starts – because the weather forecast said snow/rain at noontime -soon we reached the top.

So we headed for the first summit – Saalbachkogel 2092m asl with our snowshoes – after about 40 minutes we reached the summit and were QRV soon.
At first it was hard to find a free frequency as there was some contest running – and on 20m band we found no free frequency for our QRP operation. So we changed for 40m – not much better but we found a frequency.
After Tom’s ufb APRS-SOTA spotting stations rushed in – so OE2WNL managed to get 12 stations in log within 20 minutes.

We packed our euipment ( 😉 insider) to walk the way back to the next summit Stemmerkogel 2123m – on the way up there was a path without snow – so we just packed our snowshoes on the backpack and walked like in good old summertimes.
On the summit we were QRV at 10:27 – again spotting via APRS and again lot of stations for contesting so a free frequency was hard to find.
The weather started to get bad during our operation – so it started to snow and wind came up.
Now the electrifying part of the day – as we packed our stuff to get back to where we started and to head for the last summit.
We had packed all our stuff in our backpacks when Tom heard some cracking noise – we then heard that this comes from the coil of his buddystick –
I then tried to raise my skiing pole into horizontal – just straight parallel to the floor – and we heard the cracking noise again – out of my skiing pole – can you imagine?
The air must have been such electrifying that my skiing pole made some noise!!! – indeed some kind of scary – so we decided to leave faster then ever – we have never experienced such an effect.

Below the summit the effect was gone – so we headed to the last summit on our list Schattberg-Ost 2096m
After about 1h we tried to get QRV again – but everytime we touched the antenna cable there was a little electric shock – I mean I know that this can happen – so you touch it – it discarges and thats it.
But in our case today – it was again and again and again – scary again – as it was again snowing heavily we put some alu-blanket over us to save us and the log from snowflakes – And again very scary we got electric shocks from this alu-blanket.
So we decided to immediately unplug the antenna from the rig (which was electro shocking us again)

We then tried to get our 4 contacts with the handheld VX-7 and VX-8 – but also in the 30cm of this antenna the cracking noise was there again – see this video.

All in all scary scary but we are happy we’ve activated 3 summits today.

Thanks to all stations – sorry that we were not QRV on shortwave on the last summit – but when the coax cable is electric shocking you – it’s not that fun 😉

Greetings from us
OE2WNL, OE2ATN