1 October 2017 Association Updates

Hi all. ZL2AJ here on behalf of the management team. Octobers updates include some assocation updates and some new associations added into the system. More to follow from individual project managers on the management team. Enjoy.

Some minor updates for ZL1 association. A few names added, one summit moved and 3 new summits discovered.

XE2 Association has kicked off with 3 regions. This association will grow to 13000 summits once complete but to get things going we have started with 3 initial regions. Baja California Sur, Nuevo Leon and Aguascalientes have been added to get XE2 into the database. There are many summits in XE to choose from, some very close to populated areas. I have word locals are planning a group activation in a few weeks time. More regions will be added to XE2 over time as the surveying is completed. We welcome Jose XE2N as the new association manager.

Minor updates for France: several improvements in the location/elevation data.

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And one major update everybody was waiting for, I’m now glad to announce that after more than a year of hard work with many people involved both locally and abroad finally the Italian association went through a major review resulting in the removal of all the wrongly placed or misidentified summits and the addition of almost 3500 new summits.

Starting with 1st of October, every summit will be correctly positioned within the accuracy of the digital mapping available, so usually not more than 50m away, so even if somebody follows the GPS coordinates it will be easy to find the summit from there; I recon only a handful of cases where the errors of digital topography would result in larger displacement. So no need from now on to guess where the intended summit is, actually the naming may have lower accuracy now, as many times touristic routes and markings lead to points with better scenery or historical significance and not to the actual highest point of an area which is the one taken into account by SOTA for defining the AZ. So please be sure to check the proper coordinates.

The large number of the newly added summits means also that the inclusiveness principle of SOTA is now fulfilled also in Italy, every summit for which 150m prominence could be easily proven is now added to the programme irrespective of being 4000m high summit with permanent snow or a small 150m hill in a mediterranean island never having any snow, with summits needing a little bit of determination to climb, like these three:


or activation zone inside the city centre (where finding a place for the antenna may be the most important challenge:

everybody can find the one most suitable for their desires.

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Many thanks Csaba, Christophe and Warren.

I’m sure everybody will be pleased to see this massive update to Italy. Finally the summit positions are worthy of your trust. What’s more, Italy is now brought into line with other associations, including the little summits, opening possibilities to more activators across a wide spectrum of abilities. Big big thanks to Csaba and his helpers for this!

This month I have some more tidying up of SP border summits - this time the OK and OM borders. Some stay as SP, others as OK or OM.

Once again please let me reassure you all that this makes no difference to which summits you can activate. If you want to activate one of the summits that now has only an SP reference, for example, from the OK (or OM) side of the border, that’s 100% FB. Use your OK (or OM if that’s where you are) call, but give the SP ref.

Thanks to the AMs who have worked with me on this.

Thanks also to DB7MM, AM for DM. Michael found some data to show that some of the previously retired summits were in fact Ok, so these are being re-enabled for activation. We will also have a number of brand new summits, but we’re still working on those - next month hopefully. The restored summits are:

  • DM/BM-002
    
  • DM/BM-133
    
  • DM/BM-256
    
  • DM/HE-047
    
  • DM/SX-002
    

Now the (other) one you’ve all been waiting for - :wink:

South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, VP8S

A few weeks ago there was an item on the BBC News Web site about new maps for South Georgia. It turned out they have a digital elevation model too, so I couldn’t resist!

To get there I guess the simplest option is one of the Antarctic cruises, but that’s going to cost you about 10 grand! But perhaps we’ll see a SOTA activation the next time there’s a DXPedition.

For completeness I’ve added the qualifying islands in the South Sandwich Islands archipelago, although these are even more remote. (And the mapping is pretty dodgy)

We’ll get some sort of ARM together shortly. VP8 AM, Rob, has agreed to stand as VP8S AM.

This week there’s another news story about South Georgia, with environmentalists urging increased protection. Perhaps this will make it more difficult to access, so you’d better hurry up!

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And one more thing I forgot to mention earlier, but certainly would be welcome by the chaser community:
3 of the earlier mentioned mediterranean island summits are on the islands of Pantelleria (IG9) and Linosa (IH9) which WAE, CQ and also IOTA considers to be part of Africa, so SOTA as well decided that these should belong to the African continent, hence a new association was created with the association code IA (Isole Africane) with these 3 summits. We believe that activating these summits can add an additional buzz given that chasing African summits are still a rare in the SOTA world.

Just about all these updates and new associations are in place now. France, South Georgia will be up later tonight I think.

Due to technical issues, VP8S is not going to be a separate association for now. It is going to be part of VP8 Falkland Islands. When the technical problem is resolved it will move to its own association and any activators and chasers will gain an additional association in their tally automatically

If you are going to any of these associations, please check the DB that your intended summit is still valid. Expect to see the changes tomorrow in Sotamaps (assuming everything works!) OM/OK/SP are border dupe removals. The summits still exist, only they now have one reference not twice.

The Map Pin on the Google Map for IA/PA-001, Montagna Grande di Isola Pantelleria is in the sea about 10 miles East of the Island, it looks like the Longitude is incorrect.

Edit: looks like a missing zero, E12.01951 is on the Island

73, Colin G8TMV

Thanks Colin for bringing this up, you are absolutely right, the longitude should read E12.0051, but as it turns out, Google Docs where we internally kept the summit data, thought that this is a date instead of number and simply changed the values to sue its needs. We will correct this in the database soon.

I still have a few F changes and VP8S to upload this evening and I’ll tweak this location at the same time.

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Final updates in place.

Position/ height details updated for some summits in F/PE & F/JU.
VP8S/SG and VP8S/SS uploaded to the VP8 association. For now these summits will be VP8/SG-001 etc. When some technical issues and design limits get tweaked, these will be a separate association.
IA/PA-001 Longitude corrected.

You can always get the latest data from the database. If you have downloaded the data, or use apps and programs that have a copy of the data please ensure you update everything to ensure you have the latest summit info. The full CSV list of summits is updated around 0300Z everyday and Rob’s Sotamaps site fetches this data every 12 hours ISTR.

No, it’s broke worse. Previously it was just wrong. Now it’s out of the valid range for a longitude.

That’s wierd Martin. The little tweak script was run on my DB and both the longitutde and GrdRef1 values are correct. I changed the DB name and hit F5 and this time only GridRef1 is correct but the longitutde value has got screwed. Strange. Sorted now.

Ah, I can see it, 124885 is the summitid. I must have hit ctrl-v and pasted the summitid in again and overwritten the longitude.

ROTFL!

ALTER TABLE summits
ADD CONSTRAINT validate_longitude
CHECK (longitude BETWEEN -180 AND 180)

maybe?

(and similarly -90 to 90 for latitude of course)

Martyn

Well yes, but really I should have fed the corrected source through the uploader which does those checks. Teaches me not to just tweak the value from console in MS SQL SMS.

Can’t say anything else than THANK YOU!!!

73 de IZ3GME Marco

Many thanks for the hard works…well done!
Now we have a lot of summits here in Italy to activate.
73 from a SOTA newbie

Fabio

Prego Marco!
Peccato che Csaba si sia dimenticato di nominare la fonte maggiore…

cit:
http://mountainqrp.forumfree.it/?t=74596863

Now we are waiting for solve the MT issues…
If some guys want to correct some mistakes on your sites…