ER/MD-008, Dealul Rădoaiei, 351m
December 20, 2025: Successful triple activation - SOTA, POTA and BOTA, in the middle of the forest near Radoaia village, about 10km from Balti municipality!
It's the place of a famous military bunker, i.e. the rusty remains of an important radio communications reception complex from the former USSR. I was amazed by the grandeur of this object - the area is like a square with sides of 150m and has there a lot of rusty bunkers of all kinds!
So, I put up the antenna (Chinese Pac-12 vertical tuned to resonance in the 20m band, with 10 radials on the ground) and in just 35 minutes I made 44 QSOs in SSB! Initially, no one was answering to my calls and I started to think that there was some problem, and then the pile-up started and I couldn't even answer everyone, when 5 people were calling me at the same time! I also had 2 summit-to-summit QSOs. In fact, the mobile data didn't work on the phone (probably because the reception was bad, too far from the cell towers), so I could not spot myself on the clusters, so I asked the first ham on my QSO list - Rainer, DK1RS, to spot me on SOTA, which he did. Thank you veeeery much!!
I worked with about 20W. Usually I'm on digital modes, with the computer, but today on the eve of the holidays I thought I'd communicate with the world live, so I received and shared a lot of xmas wishes!
This way I activated the Radoaia Hill ER/MD-008, as I was exactly at the top (it's a kind of flat hill), then the bunker B/ER-0004, and also the park/forest MD-0191, the "Radoaia Medicinal Plant Reserve". The temperature was +1 degree C, and it was wet with lots of mud and puddles, hence not so comfortable for ham radio activities outside, but I enjoyed the fresh air, gazing at the weird rusty beasts in the forest, hahaha!
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QSO list:
Thanks a lot to hams who responded to my calls!
73! de ER1SKI/P