4 summit activation around Mt Dom Dom

Hi all,

Again, it’s time to head for the hills and get into some of that SOTA good oil. For this series of activations, I wanted to have a good look at 2m again, and the colinear was planned to see a lot of action. I did take the end fed for 40m, but the plan was to only use it if I could not get 4 contacts on each summit. We’ll see how things go.

Mt Vinegar VK3/VC-005

This summit is between Dom Dom saddle and Mt Donna Buang. From either place, it would take some time to get in, and this was my original plan. On looking at maps, I thought I might be able to get closer access from Acheron Way, and this proved to be the case.

Access can be via Caters Gap Rd and this is a forest road with large aggregate. Forest Explorer shows it becoming a 4wd track, but the road quality remains good. I thought I would use the Cleft Rock Walking Track, but could not find it. That area had been subject to recent logging, so the track would have been destroyed anyway. I proceeded to point 825356 and turned left, to head up the hill. This went through a logging area, but the track remained passable for a 2wd without too much difficulty. I climbed up the mountain and parked about 843345. I could have gone about another 500m before a locked gate about 1km from the summit. In any case, it was a much shorter walk than I had anticipated.

I put up the colinear and called on 146.5 FM. This was going to be the most difficult summit out of the three that I had planned for the day as Mt Vinegar is hidden from Melbourne by a few closer hills that are part of the Donna Buang system. Even on VK3REC, a EMDRC repeater, action was slow – but this was not because I could not reach it. Perhaps people were slow out of bed today. I was able to reach the repeater with just a HT with a 1/4 wave antenna, so I was able to keep the FT-817 on the colinear. I eventually had to try 144.1 SSB to get the 4th contact. The stub I have for the antenna gives a good SWR at 144.1, so it is good to see that this project has obtained a good result.

Here’s the operating location at Mt Vinegar:

Operating location at Mt Vinegar

When operating, it’s always nice to have a good rock to sit on:

The shack at Mt Vinegar

With the car closer than planned, I thought I might be able to get to Mt Gordon a little before 11am for the UTC midnight change over.

Mt Gordon VK3/VN-027

This summit is part of the 2013 batch to join the SOTA program in Victoria. It is a summit located between Marysville and Narbethong. Access is via a 2wd track that heads off to the north from Marysville Rd which is shown in Forest Explorer as a 4wd track.

There is some commercial gear at the summit as shown below:

Commercial towers at Mt Gordon

With these commercial towers, I imagined that I would suffer from QRM problems with overloaded frontends and it proved to be the case. The colinear is fantastic at bringing in weak signals, but the downside is an overloaded FT-817 front end. With the FT-817 overloaded, there was no point trying the Wouxun HT.

I was able to get two contacts before 11am, and a good number afterwards. I had enough FM contacts to get the SOTA activation points, but sometimes it took some patience. I was getting into Melbourne well enough, but the QRM would take out the readability of other stations. It came and went, and when it was absent, I had a sub s1 noise floor.

A nice touch at the end was getting VK3PF on SSB at 146.475 This frequency is turning out to be a SOTA vertical SSB frequency of choice, just a little down from the national FM calling frequency. I still go down to 144.1 for the SSB chasers down there still, although most of those have horizontal antennas at that frequency, so there’s a bit of a mismatch with my vertical colinear.

Here’s a look through some of the regrowth (and cooked dead trees) towards Marysville from the summit:

Marysville from Mt Gordon

Here was a good view of the Cathedral Ranges from Mt Gordon:

Cathedral Ranges from Mt Gordon

Mt Dom Dom VK3/VN-017

Call me irrational, but a high profile search from a few years ago had me edgy about this place. Still, Mt Dom Dom likely to be the easiest of the three summits to activate on 2m, so the HF antenna would remain unused. I headed in from Dom Dom saddle to about point 813382 on what is marked a 4wd track but is a narrow but good 2wd track. The point where I left the car is about where Forest Explorer shows a walking track. This walking track does not exist. The southern side of Mt Dom Dom has been logged in recent years, so the growth is not too bad. I headed up the side of the mountain “following my nose”. Most of the time it was ok. I think the best approach is to head up the middle on any old logging vehicle tracks that still exist. In a few years, the whole place will be overgrown and access will have to be via the more mature forest on either side of the recently logged areas.

Here’s a look at my operating location there:

Operating location at Mt Dom Dom

Action was still a little slow from Mt Dom Dom. I was getting strong reports from those who did come up from Melbourne, but there were not too many of them.

Got a nice view looking back towards Melbourne from near the summit. See if you can find my car:

Watt River valley and Melbourne from Mt Dom Dom

A highlight of this activation was a QSO with Glenn VK3YY on Britannia Range VK3/VC-011. Mt Donna Buang is in the way, but we were able to get the QSO home on SSB. I’ll need to find out from Glenn what antenna he was using.

Mt Toolebewong VK3/VC-033

My final activation was actually an unplanned one, but because I was running ahead of schedule, I was able to put in for a bonus summit. Signals from here were stronger into Melbourne, as more paths were unobstructed. I had a lucky one at the end with Peter VK3ZPF, who called on 146.5 halfway through packing up, but I left the HT on. We were able to exchange reports, but I still had the colinear up in the air. This allowed us to compare the 1/4 wave “rubber ducky” with the colinear. Both ways were significantly up with the colinear.

And with that, it was time to head for home. A nice day with 4 new summits to add to the uniques collection and 18 SOTA points.

Regards, Wayne VK3WAM