Yes… there really is a mountain called Wank. It is located near Garmish-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, DL/EW-001. You can find it on SOTA data here: https://www.sotadata.org.uk/de/summit/DL/EW-001
It was the morning of! After an excited alert on SOTAwatch, that we attended to summit Wank at 11:30 (giving us ample time to faff with equipment once we had actually arrived), we were ready to go!
With a kindly loaned Yaesu FT-818nd in hand, a rubber duck antenna, a slim jim (for the 2m band), and a SOTAbeams Band Springer Midi Antenna, complete with pocket transmatch (for antenna tuning), and an SOTA beams Tactical Mini antenna mast, we were ready to try our first SOTA! As my foundation UK callsign is not valid in Germany, we were reliant on my Dad to do that actual CQ’ing for us. As he has problems with his ankle, we took the cable car up (this is well within the SOTA rules, as, although they do encourage people to get up the mountains under their own steam, they do allow for people to take transport up, as long as the actual assembling of the kit is done outside). This also meant that lugging three antennas up the mountain was achievable!
So, complete with all the gear and no idea, and after an 18 minute cable car journey, we were ready to set up! We took out the 2m slim jim, attached it to the end of a walking pole, and leaned it against a tree. (This can be seen in the picture above.) Already, the author is cringing, as to why we bothered to attach it to the pole at all, as surely we could have just placed the antenna in the tree! As soon as we tuned into the 2m band (145.500 MHz), we could hear the chatter of other people doing SOTA! We heard some others doing a summit-to-summit activation! (That means more points!), however, when we attempted to join in at the appropriate moment, it seemed as though we had not been heard. Unsure as to whether we had been successful, we decided to head to the nearest mountain hut, and regroup.
The second attempt, we took out the slim jim and held the walking stick in the air. We could immediately hear a CQ call on the 2m band from another amateur, but frustratingly could not answer! After re-trying, this time with the rubber duck antenna, it was then that we realised that we had not been transmitting with the full 6Watts that the Yaesu FT-818 could deliver, but the rather measly default 2.5! As soon as we switched over, we got our first contact! This was doubly exciting, as not only was it our first successful “CQ SOTA”, but also the first contact any of us had ever had during our very short amateur radio career! It was all the more impressive, that we were able to do this with the stubby rubber duck antenna.
The SOTA rules state that “At least one QSO must be made from the Summit to qualify an activation. In order for the activation to qualify for the points attributed to that Summit, a minimum of four QSOs must be made, each of which must be with a different station.”
Although we were still three contacts away from getting points for Mount Wank, we decided to call it a success, pleased that we had managed to activate our first summit. Lesson learned: read the manual for the radio, and plan to be on the summit for a while, in order to make the four required contacts!