The Idaho Kool-Aid kids, K7MK and K7ZO, accomplished our Triple Play on July 31. Not without some usual SOTA challenges. We got a late start courtesy of a plumbing emergency at K7ZO's QTH (aren't all plumbing projects emergencies?). So, we had about an hour less time for our summit quests than we had planned. Thanks to support from our RZR drivers and chauffeurs, Steve and Rich, we were able to zoom around 20+ miles of typical Idaho back-country road and ATV trails, being dropped of for our final pedestrian climbs to the activation points. We did manage to get two stations on the air at our first summit, Pilot Peak, W7I/BC-056. K7ZO was very happy with the performance of his SOATbeam dipole making its first trip into the field. Compared to K7MK's KX3 Helper EndFed in a verti-sloper configuration, the dipole was lower noise and getting stronger signal reports both ways. However, realizing our time shortage we put up just one station at Summit 7905, W7I-BC-059 and our final stop at Sunset Mountain, W7I/BC-062. That KX3 Helper EndFed and SOATbeam travel mast goes up and down very quickly. From arrival at the activation point we can be on the air in under 5 minutes with K7ZO setting up the TS-480 and K7MK setting up the antenna. We are not quite like a NASCAR pit stop crew -- but getting close. Also, with limited time we pretty much stayed just on 20M. K7ZO did make a few 40M QSOs at our first stop. We called on 40M without any QSOs at our second stop, and then skipped it all together at our last summit.
Like most Idaho summits these three have not been activated frequently in the past. We were the fourth activation of Sunset and Pilot and the third for 7905 (and also the first one for 7905 not during the winter when snow cover makes snowmobile access arguably the easiest way to get to many Idaho summits.)
Luckily we did have end having cell phone data service on the summits. Our AT&T phones showed nothing but "No Service" all day. However K7MK had acquired a StraightTalk Mobile Hotspot which seems to use Verizon. That worked, Fine Business, as they say. To think about it, it was pretty crazy. Out in the middle of no-where, put the Hotspot down on a rock, it connects, we connect our iPhones to it, and network away!
Thanks everyone for your willingness to be handed off back and forth to each of us as we passed the mic around on the last two summits. And also for pretty late in the day chaser participation. We did not summit Sunset Mountain until 6:15PM local time (MDT) and were a bit worried about getting our 4 QSOs. But that turned out to be no problem as we had more callers than at our first two stops with several first time chasers in our logs.
We will update the standings in our 2015 Idaho Kool-Aid Kids Chaser Challenge in the next couple of days. (Though my guess right now is that the top three places are held by W7RV, W0MNA, and W0ERI.) Individual summit reports will be posted on the pnwSOTA website which will automatically link to the Summit Information pages on SOTAwatch.
Idaho Triple Play -- Success!
