Last Sunday, I hiked up Cerro de San Pedro, SOTA summit EA4/MD-020 (1425m) to work in this month’s national V-UHF contest. I was on the summit for 4 hours, from 7:00UTC to 11:00UTC, and I managed to work quite a few stations. As always, I used my portable QRP station consisting of a Yaesu FT-817ND and an Arrow satellite yagi antenna (3 elements in 144MHz and 7 elements in 432MHz).
In the map of stations worked, my position is in red, stations worked both in 144MHz and 432MHz are in green and stations worked only in 144MHz are in blue.
The weather was nice: sunny but not too hot. Activity on the Sunday morning was high, although for some reason people seemed to start disappearing after 10:00UTC. Propagation was very good on 144MHz and I managed to hear a couple of French stations.
Other than that, no interesting remarks apart from the fact that although the SSB sub-bands are quite wide (technically 250kHz for the 144MHz band and 300kHz for the 432MHz band) people tend to concentrate too much on just a couple of frequencies near the calling frequency. Some times, I could hear 3 or 4 QSOs going on on the same frequency, all of them with strong signals, and some people didn’t move when they heard that the frequency was in use. A couple times, after being told by another station to go to 432.230MHz to try UHF, I jumped there only to find that one or two QSOs where already going on in this frequency. What do people have for this frequency? Just pick some random frequency to try 432MHz.
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