First post - an introduction

Hello everyone! This page contains information on our ham radio activity, mostly SOTA. But first things first: who are we and what is SOTA. We are two ham radio operators that happen to be brothers and also happen to love hiking. Summits on the Air, or SOTA, "is an award scheme for radio amateurs that encourages portable operation in mountainous areas". You can find more about the award on the official website, www.sota.org.uk/ . We think of it as a nice way to combine the two hobbies - ham radio and hiking. Our call-signs are YO8SSQ (Andrei) and YO8SBR (Bogdan), and we're usually /P when participating in SOTA. So why Chicera? It's a Romanian word with unknown origins meaning "summit".

We knew of the SOTA award for many years, but the lack of suitable radio equipment prevented us from participating. So at the end of 2016, YO8SSH, a fellow radio amateur from our area, told us that he started participating in SOTA and that a few other hams from our town joined the program. Without thinking too much about it, my brother and I started activating our first summits in December 2016, using handheld radios in 70cm and 2m bands. Usually there are not many people listening on these frequencies, but because everybody started activating or at least chasing summits, we could do it using only the handhelds. At the end of the month we got ourselves an Yaesu FT857D and in the last day of the year, 31 Dec 2016, we started making SOTA contacts in 14MHz. It's January now and since our first activation in December we've already hiked on over 10 summits. Don't worry, we're not going to keep this pace for long - we mainly achieved the feat thanks to the winter holidays. 

​Happy new year & 73!