Arnold (OE1IAH) & friends

 5 SOTA focused HAMs visiting OH73ELK

In late May 2025, our twelve-day trip started,  north from Vienna to Finland by car to activate SOTA summits in all visited countries. We reached OH73ELK on Sunday 1st of June. The house was well prepared on our arrival on Sunday evening. Water in the boiler was already heated up. The house itself is best suited for a group of four adults but also copes with six if

necessary. It offers a well-equipped kitchen, refrigerator, dishwasher and so on. There are 3 bedrooms, toilet, and a shower. The house itself hides in the very north of the island. Easy to find if you use electronic maps, you can find it on Google, Bing and so on. We used the installed shack on the 1st floor offering an IC7300 and lots of antennas. HF environment on the island is silent, and the available antennas work fine. Unfortunately, the space weather during our visit was a bit against us. Extreme sun storms cleared the bands most of the time of our visit. We brought a QO-100 station with us. To my knowledge it was the first time that OH73ELK was active on the satellite via 10GHz. The best location to erect the dish was near the lake. We had local traffic to Finnish HAMs which were happy to get the famous callsign in their satellite logs. There was also a lot of response from our home country Austria. We worked many other countries all over Europe and even Brazil.

During our visit we had nice local early summer weather, 12-25°C. We were warned about mosquitoes, but this was not an issue during our stay. The lake was about 15°C, nice to visit after a sauna session. One of our HAMs swam across the lake to the opposite island. Overall, we spent hardly a week there. This was definitely too short visit. The house and the area offer a lot of activities which we barely used, as we focused on SOTA, six summits, of which were two first time activations.

As already mentioned, we used the wood heated sauna and the lake to swim. The house has a charcoal grill in the garden with a hut to eat. We found lots of blueberry plants growing, unfortunately not mature at the time of our visit.

The group agreed there is a strong need to revisit OH73ELK. 

"I'll be back" as another famous Austrian "Arnold" formulated....

73 de

Arnold OE1IAH, Reinhard OE1RHC, Martin OE1MVA, Alexander OE1LZS, Andreas OE3BAJ