Mt. Tamalpais SOTA activation 2020-11-14

2021-01-20

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I’m back with a new report - I had quite a bit of fun in the North Bay last November activating Mount Tamalpais aka W6/CC-063.

The mountain is a birthplace of mountain biking and had been mentioned in The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac - the book made me fall in love and eventually move in with California.

Also this is the place where apes from Dawn of the planet of the Apes live.

Getting there

There is a long winding road climbing from Fairfax via Alpine lake. If you start early you’ll have a chance to see fog boiling in the lake valley.

Starting early you can catch fog in valleys

As with Mt. Diablo you can drive up almost to the summit. The mountain has three peaks and parking is close to Eastern peak with a fire lookout.

Mount Tamalpais SOTA activation

There is not much space around the fire lookout but I was able to tie my dipole to the rocks “wrapping” the building. Suboptimal given all this barbed wire and rebars interfering with the antenna but it worked ok.

Stations worked from W6/CC-063

20 meter band had been extremely noisy, had to QSY to 40 meters.

Time UTC	Call sign	RST sent	RST received	Frequency	Mode	Location
18:15	K0DTJ	559	559	7.032	CW	CM87
18:16	NW7E	559	559	7.032	CW	CN94
18:17	K6YK	559	559	7.032	CW	CM97
18:20	KE6RS	559	559	7.032	CW	CM88
18:29	K7GA	559	559	7.032	CW	DM22
18:32	NS7P	559	559	7.032	CW	CN84
18:36	N6MKW	559	559	7.032	CW	DM04

Hiking the loop

My plan was to work HF from the Eastern summit and hike a clockwise loop East Ridgecrest Blvd => Arturo trail => Upper Northside trail => Parking visiting two remaining peaks because SOTA with no hike is not fun. AA6XA wrote in his blog post the correct peak to activate is the Western one. I would say the difference in height is negligible but there is an abandoned base of 666th Radar Squadron and an active FAA radar installation on the Western peak. I decided to keep out and activate from the Eastern peak instead.