Father and Son complete SOTA England

Father and son team Tom Read M1EYP and Jimmy Read 2E0EYP have 'completed England' in Summits on the Air.

Tom and Jimmy can now claim to have activated each of the 176 summits currently in the English (G) SOTA Association, and six more that were previously valid.

Tom, who had been activating in SOTA since 2002, needed to revisit many of the completed hills after his son Jimmy became licensed (originally as M3EYP) in 2005, and expressed his ambition to activate all the same hills as his dad!  Since then, the duo have visited all hilly and mountainous areas of England, and completed all the SOTA regions:  Southern Pennine (SP), Welsh Borders (WB), Devon & Cornwall (DC), South Central (SC), Southern England (SE), Central England (CE), Tees to the Wash (TW), Scottish Borders (SB), Northern Pennines (NP) and Lake District (LD).

Tom and Jimmy have also activated a further 104 summits in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland over the last seven years, and retain ambitions to visit many more, including those in the Isle of Man.  The pair from Macclesfield in Cheshire are both holders of the SOTA Mountain Goat award for achieving 1000 activator points in the programme, and walked the full-length Pennine Way (268 miles) in 2006 as part of their SOTA activities.

The final summit needed to complete the association was Harter Fell (Eskdale) G/LD-028, 654m ASL.  This took place on Sunday 29th July 2012, after a steep ascent from Dunnerdale.  Jimmy operated using his special Olympic Games callsign of 2O0EYP/P and made 33 contacts on 2m FM using a Yaesu VX-110 transceiver and 3 element SOTA Beam antenna.  Tom, also used a special Olympics callsign - MO1EYP/P - and made 40 contacts, mainly on 40m CW.  Tom's working conditions were 5 watts from a Yaesu FT-817 into am inverted V dipole antenna.

Jimmy is the Association Manager for the SOTA programme in England, so it is a particualrly proud achievement for him to have activated all of its summits.  The pair have a website on which a photo journal of all their SOTA activations can be seen.  This includes each of the 182 English summits, and all of the total of 286 UK summits so far activated.  The website is at http://tomread.co.uk

For more information about the Summits on the Air programme, please visit - http://www.sota.org.uk​