Lotoroute

In May, we took road trips to Halsou, a small village in Basque country and to San Sebastián, just on the other side of the Spanish border. It was a fair amount of driving and to pass time, we kept track of the number of license plates (registry plates, plaques d’immatriculation) with various French Department codes or European country code. For instance, we live in Gironde, which is département 33 and part of the Nouvelle Acquitaine région with country code “F” for France. A truck passing us might be from Spain with a country code “E” (not ES – these aren’t ISO 3166 codes). A car from England might be either GB or UK, depending on whether their plate was from back when Britain was great or after (2021).

As I understand it, this is a pretty common activity for family car trips — the French are particularly attached to their department numbers (although strictly speaking, the number of your plate no longer strictly reflects where you live). So, I was suprised when I did a quick search that there weren’t apps for some form of road bingo (or loto, in French). So, I wrote one. It’s at https://dhakajack.itch.io/lotoroute and is free to play online.

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Hangperson

I’ve written a new variant on that old game, hangman, but modernized it just a bit. The game can be played online in your browser at http://templaro.com/games/hangperson. The game play is familiar: guess the missing letters of a word or die trying, but I’ve added some features. First you can play in English, French, Russian or Greek. So that’s a bit different. Also, you can pick your difficulty. A scoreboard keeps track of how many games you have won out of however many you have played. Finally, as you would expect, if you guess incorrectly, body parts get added to a picture and when the last part is added, you lose. There is a different, culturally inappropriate picture for each language.

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Migration

Templaro.com has picked up stakes and moved from A2 Hosting to Opalstack. The site started at io.com (io.com) in 1997, the heyday of animated gifs and PERL CGI scripts with now laughable security measures. IOCOM began as Steve Jackson Games’ Illuminati Online BBS (the one raided in the early 90s by the US secret service to investigate conspiracy theories). By he late 90s, it had morphed into a very welcoming early ISP, a favorite of PERL developers. Unfortunately, it was bought out and the new corporate overlords absolutely screwed the pooch.

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Duolingo Fail

I’m a little miffed at Duolingo for torpedoing my progress this week. I had set the goal of hitting 100,000 XP in a week. Let’s put aside the whether that’s nuts or not — after a few years of using the app, I wanted to push it boundaries. I got to 92,000 points and found myself yanked from the leaderboard. I’m not sure if it was algorithmic or an administrative reaction to a user complaint , but it was really disheartening since I had invested not an insignificant amount of time owling my way up all week. I’m not the one that gamified Duolingo — they are — so it seems ingenuous of them to react poorly to someone gaming the game.

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SOTA F/MC-233: La Plane

This is a drive-up peak about two and half hours from my house outside Bordeaux, just about due East along route A-62. A paved access road runs to a series of commercial radio towers at the top of the hill, but I pulled off the access road a bit earlier and set up on a grassy field separated from the antenna site by a row of trees. This was a very relaxed outing and I set up a table, some folding chairs and had a nice picnic lunch with F5LGB, who accompanied me from our club station, F6KPW.

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SOTA: F/MC-192 (La Ramière)

This was the final of three sites near Brive-la-Gaillarde that I had activated on a day trip starting near Bordeaux; the other two peaks were F/MC-263 and F/MC-178. What sets this site apart is that I was not only activating a summit, but a prehistoric megalith (I’m not aware if there is a program for that, but probably).

My first inclination was just to follow a road towards a commercial antenna site near the summit, but when I looked at the site on OpenTopo, I saw a point of interest within the activation zone, the Dolmen du Puy de la Ramière. The map also showed paths leading from roads to the dolmen. A quick check with GoogleStreet view showed me that there are signs along the street and a parking lot next to the trail head, so I decided to take the trail to the dolmen and pick an activation spot in the woods a bit off the trail.

OpenTop Map showing the SOTA summit (red marker) and to its right the Dolmen du Puy de la Ramière and related trails.
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SOTA: F/MC-178 (Roche de Vic)

This was the middle-of-the-day summit on my tour including F/MC-263 and F/MC-192, and it turned out to be the most comfortable of the three.

The site shows up on various online maps because there is a chapel on the summit and I have the impression that it is a landmark that probably draws tourists during the summer months. At the base of the hill, there is a large gravel car park, and although a number of cars came and went, I was the only one who went up the hill.

The view up the hill from the parking lot. The path up runs along the trees to the left. There is a picnic table behind the trees on the right.

I think other people probably struck out in different directions on hikes or made use of the picnic tables near the parking lot.

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SOTA: F/MC-263 (Lacoste)

I left the house near Bordeaux in the early morning and returned after dark, but I succeeded in activating three sites clustered just east of Brive-la-Gaillarde: F/MC-263 (Lacoste), F/MC-178 (Roche de Vic) and F/MC-192 (La Ramière).

The shaded area with dotted border at lower left is the north-east corner of the FL/SO area. If you wanted to add one more summit to a trip like this, you could consider FL/SO-004, which is in that corner. I might have done this if it were mid-summer with longer daylight time.

The journey commences with MC-263, which is a grassy hilltop with a commercial antenna tower at one end, but plenty of room to activate at the other end. My GPS calculated directions correctly, taking me through a hilltop village with some narrow streets. The final road to the top was dirt and gravel, but no problem, although after a recent rain the top of the hill itself got muddy.

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SOTA: EA2/ZG-011 (San Caprasio)

This was the third of the three summits that I activated after renting a car in Zaragoza, the first two sites were EA2/ZG-065 and EA2/ZG-060. Of the three, this one was the most remote and the road quality from EA2/ZG-060 to EA2/ZG-011 and then back to Zaragoza was the worst of the trip. My rental car was not an off road vehicle or even a crossover model, but it did have a bit higher clearance than some of the other cars in the line up at Hertz. I think that helped because the center hump was pronounced at some points and I drove a couple segments straddling some deeper crevices.

However, it turned out to be more than worthwhile to tolerate a few kilometers of white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel: this summit yielded my longest S2S contact (with New York, USA) and I think my only SOTA QSOs between Europe and South America (multiple stations in Brazil).

The site is visible from a long way off and coming around this turn in the road. Not only is it a prominence, but the summit also overlooks a deep valley.
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SOTA: EA2/ZG-060 (Monte Oscuro)

The second summit on my whirlwind tour of the outskirts of Zaragoza was the weather radar site at Monte Oscuro. After leaving EA2/ZG-065, the roads quickly transitioned from paved to dirt, but the general condition of the road was pretty good. I would just recommend taking it easy to avoid some of the larger ruts. The final bit of road to the peak transitioned briefly to concrete, probably in an area that had eroded. The peak itself, though, is a dirt road loop with the upper part of the loop passing the radar.

I did not see any signs indicating that the area was off limits, but there is a chain across the top of the road, so I assume no unauthorized vehicles should go past that point.
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