With summer now here and the cold weather, for the most part, behind us, parks and trails are opened up and people are out hiking and enjoying the great outdoors. Some even hike up mountains. Some even take their portable ham radios with them too. Andrew, K1YMI, is the manager for the W2 region of the US, for Summits on The Air or SOTA, and he’s activated about a dozen summits himself. And with over 700 summits in the W2 region, there’s plenty of room to activate more.

Photo by Andrew, K1YMI

If you haven’t heard of SOTA, it’s an Amateur Radio awards program started by John Linford, G3WGV and Richard G3CWI. It took around 1000 man hours they said to get things going, and got help from Matthew M5EVT, Alan M1EYO and Roger MW0IDX. They never thought it would get a large number of people interested in it, but hundreds of people have participated in the program, with Andrew being one of them.

Just recently Andrew climbed the highest peak in Fulton County here in Upstate New York. It’s called Pigeon Mountain, and is 2780 feet above sea level. He has been posting some pics of the hikes he’s been taking before, but now he’s going an extra step and posting stories to a new blog he has started, called K1YMI: Ramblings of a Ham. He’s starting importing posts from his old WordPress blog that he hosted himself, so you can also read his previous posts, including a few of his other activations for Summits on the Air.

If you are in the W2 area, check in with Andrew and see about activating a summit. If you’re in another area, why not check with your area manager, or if there isn’t one yet, and you feel like this is a great activity, why not consider being a manager? Fresh air and operating can’t be beat in my opinion. If I had a portable HF radio, I would be out there too. This may be a good excuse to brush up on the code and build a little QRP kit, don’t you think?

Here’s also a video Andrew posted about a find he made on his way down from Pigeon Mountain. Enjoy!

73.

Rich also writes a Tech blog and posts stories every Tuesday and Thursday on Q103, The Rock of Albany’s website, as well as Amateur Radio stories every Monday thru Friday here on AmiZed Studios.

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