Yesterday, I went out today with a couple of guys from the amateur radio club to do some maintenance on a remote repeater station that's been offline since the beginning of summer. The mountain was on top of the Hodgson Range next to Lords Table Mountain which you can see in most of my photos.
I didn't start the tracker app on my phone until a bit of the way up the mountain, but this tracked bit was 1.4 km with a 288m elevation up basalt rock faces and escarpments. The yellow line I drew in was the rough route we took back down to the road. It took us approx 1.5 hours to climb up and 2.5 hours to come back down.
When we eventually found the tower site, we found the repeater tower had fallen over with a couple of the guy wires rusted through and the top antenna had been struck by lightning at some stage.
So some rigging of what was left of the guy wires and a lot of grunting and lifting to lift the tower back up and string it back in position.
A couple of new batteries for the repeater and new digital APRS modules were installed as well as a new solar charge controller.
While we were on the top of the mountain, a light shower came down followed by a stiff S-W wind that chilled us to the core just before we headed back down. Luckily the trip down dried us out and warmed us up again.
On the downward trip, we took the left-hand spur line as it had rained while we were up there, and this also meant that we didn't have to scramble back down some of the rock faces that we had to tackle on the way up.
As you can see from the rust in the old fridge, this station has been up there for about 30 years now and all of the larger gear was lifted in a helicopter back in the day.