YLFF-123 "Korneti un Peļļi " New one!

6th of April 2013.

I was in doubt to go anywhere on this weekend but early Saturday morning started to check the maps. I still needed one more activation to qualify for activators Gold award. The closest to me territories already were activated and I choose the one where I never was before. The place named Korneti which is on the very NE corner of Latvia. Famous because of its relatively small but elongated and deep lakes. There are several of them in a row with a maximum depth of 35m.  Once the destination was set, I checked for a possible place to park the car within a territory. That is the main problem in wintertime as the snow is deep and local gravel roads often are cleaned the way that the driving width is for only one car. It is hard to find a parking "pocket" cleaned off the snow. As You see from pictures it is still very deep reaching about 50cm off the road. Recently on Friday we had some extra snowfall and that resulted in at least 15cm of fresh snow at the operation site. Needless to say that nobody cares about cleaning it as within fews days hopefully it will thaw itself. 

Searching for a place to park I drove back almost to the border with Estonia which I crossed on my way to this area just a half an hour before. The sign of a private property turned me back and I found a place which was on the bottom of some small valley and only about 20m apart from power lines. I was concerned about the impact this could make to operation, but I was wrong. I did not felt anything negative I worried about. During ground rod installation some local women passing by asked me - am I panting mines?

Anyway the activation was fine and even several 10m QSOs were made. The most active bands however were 30 and 40m. On 20m SSB I worked with VE7MH which was a surprise for me. After four and a half hours 376 QSOs were logged. Only Africa and Oceania were missing in this activation.