New Years Day 2023 found us camping at Peketa, just South of Kaikoura.
Most of the SOTA summits around the area are on private land apart from Mt Fyffe ZL3/CB-425. I had already arranged to activate it with Dave later in the week so, after a bit of research and a phone call, settled on Kaitoa ZL3/CB-767. It's a sugarloaf just North of the township, up the Puhi Puhi River Valley, near Hapuku. The farmer was happy for me to have access - for his contact info, email me.
New Years Day dawned fine and I was soon at the start point, parked up by the woolshed. Seeing signs of life as I walked past the house, I stopped in and met Rob. He gave me a couple of tips on the best routes up and down.
It's a straightforward walk up well maintained farm tracks to the summit. Apart from a short section of native bush, you are in open paddocks all the way.
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| View from the summit back towards Kaikoura |
You pass a substantial comms/internet installation on the way but I had no noticeable interference from it's equipment or solar regulators.
Keen on VHF contacts to Christchurch and with fairly benign (albeit cool) weather, I set up right at the top, bungeeing my pole to a convenient fence post.
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| EFHW and Coaxial 2m dipole on mast. 2 element Arrow yagi against trig |
I had also taken my 3 element 2m Arrow yagi (uses a walking pole as the boom) but when assembling it, found the bottom element mount missing... Oh well, try it as a 2 element! As it turned out, it was a couple of S points better to Rick ZL3RIK on Mt Pearce than the dipole and I worked Roger ZL3RC at home in West Melton with solid signals (horizontally polarised). There was a slim chance of a contact with Brendon ZL1ALF on his summit (ZL1/WL-059 McKerrow) in Wellington. We tried a few calls each but nothing heard either way.
HF was in good shape and I had a ball working other portable operators around New Zealand and Australia. USA and Japan stations were also logged but my focus today was on Summit-to-summit (S2S) contacts, each side of the 1pm UTC rollover. Thus, I spent much more time on 40m SSB than is normal for me. The strategy paid off with 60 contacts, 29 of them S2S.
The walk down was uneventful and again, had a chat to the farmer as I went past the house.
A really enjoyable and productive New Years activation.
Access: Private land, permission required. Contact me for details.
Trig - Yes
Time: 1 1/2 hours (New years day pace...) 4.8km/676m vertical
Repeater: didn't try but 705/725 should be Ok. VHF LOS to Banks Peninsula Summits.
