5 Jan 2017, SOTA on YO/EC-584 "Pleșa"

Essential summit info

Target summit: YO/EC-584 "Plesa" - http://www.sota.org.uk/Summit/YO/EC-584
Our Route: From the Plesa village we took the dirt road next to the Dom Polski (Polish House) building. The trail is marked as a touristic trail with a blue vertical line. The ridge is reached after a few hundreds of meters of moderate climbing, then it gets rather easy. Towards the end be sure to go left and climb on the actual summit, which is not on the main ridge. GPS track here: http://www.wandermap.net/en/route/3503405-plesa/​ .
Summit conditions: Wooded, mostly beech trees, with plenty of space to set-up radio equipment. Can be done regardless of season. No authorization required (Jan 2017).

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Activation report

On the 4th of January we said "Tomorrow and the next few days we'll be, most probably, taking a break from SOTA due to low temperatures and strong winds in our area. We're a bit tired, too! :D"

But we managed to do some hiking after all. The weather was better than expected, mostly sunny, with some sporadic winds. We started climbing at 9:20 UTC and reached the summit around 10:30 UTC, deployed the antenna and the rest of the equipment. First we called our YO friends in 70cm and 2m bands and then switched to 20m. Unfortunately there were some problems with the SOTA database and we couldn't spot ourselves on sotawatch.org . Our usual chasers questioned our reference number, but we double-checked everything and we seemed to be OK. Even so, and with the help of YO8SKY who spotted us on regular clusters, we made enough QSOs to go home satisfied. Now the SOTA websites are working fine. Thank you for chasing us! 73!