Cyrn y Brain SOTA Activation

Equipment Used

• Icom IC705
• 2m Flowerpot antenna (homebrew)
• 2m Horizontal 1/2 wave dipole (homebrew)
• PoLo logging app on iPad mini

Parking Location What3Words

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Activation Report

For Summits On The Air (SOTA), you can only get the activation points for a summit once a year. For me, this means progressively travelling further away from home throughout the year, to reach summits that I haven’t activated in that year. So the New Year brings a welcome reset, where and I can start the year activating my local summits again. I am lucky to have two local SOTA summits, Moel y Gamelin and Cyrn y Brain. The car park, opposite the Ponderosa cafe (now closed), where the walk to each summit starts, is just a 15 minute drive from home. Its no surprise that my first activation for 2026, was going to be one of these two summits

I left home at around 10 am, most of the snow from the previous weekend had now melted. The weather, as I drove through Llangollen was fair. However, as I was driving up the Horseshoe Pass, the green fields soon turned to white snow, and it became a very different snow scene. A stark reminder, of how different the weather on hills, can be very different to the valleys below. I had alerted to activate Moel y Gamelin, my favourite local summit. But as I got out of the car, the bitterly cold wind hit me. Knowing that there would be limited shelter from the wind, on Moely y Gamelin, I made the decision to change the summit for this activation to Cyrn y Brain.

I started walking at about 10:20 am up the snow covered path. At first the snow wasn’t a problem, but as I started up the steeper incline, traction became more challenging. I stopped to put my micro spikes on and that did improve the going. As I reached the higher part of the track, the drifts were deep in places and progress slowed again.

After an hour of slow going, I finally reached the cold and windy summit. I quickly deployed my DD Tarps magic carpet, on the floor of the stone shelter, and started to set up my station.

For this activation, I was operating only on 2m FM, and 2m SSB. I setup the flowerpot antenna, on my carbon 6 pole, and started with 2m FM. First in the log, before I could even get a spot out, was Dave, G6AEK. This was then followed by a 220km contact, with GM6LJE in Scotland. I soon had the required 4 contacts in the log, before callers dried up. I changed mode to SSB, and was about to put a spot out. Suddenly I had that sinking feeling, as I realised that my first spot was on the wrong mode and frequency. The PoLo logging app, very nicely spots you on your current logging mode and frequency. However, for some reason, I had forgotten to change the frequency from my previous activation. I corrected the frequency, and then sent a new spot. I then continued to work 2m FM, incase I had missed someone. Luckily, I managed to get John, G0MHF in the log, he had been trying to chase me on my erroneously spotted frequency. With FM definitely finished this time, I again changed mode to 2m SSB. I was working vertical polarisation with the flowerpot antenna. With another spot out, first in the log for SSB, was John, G0MHF, followed by several more SSB contacts. Interestingly, I tried working 2m SSB using a horizontal polarisation, and the only contact I had was again John, G0MHF. This did give us both an opportunity, to experiment with horizontal versus vertical polarisation, for 2m SSB.

To summarise the activation, I had five, 2m FM contacts, Five, 2m SSB contacts, although, as you can see from the log below, there were some repeat contacts. This is because of the SOTA challenge for 2026. Contacts made on 2m SSB, attract challenge points, for both activator and chaser.

After the final QSO with John, I was beginning to really feel the cold. I made one last CQ call, and then went QRT. I quickly packed my packed away my gear, and made a hasty descent back to the car.

The interactive map below shows a track of the route taken. You can zoom in or out to change the scale. The map can also be shown in full screen. The GPX track can also be downloaded using the link below the map.

Download file for GPS

Further information can be found on the SOTA resource page for the summit