Chaser Points Given Out

We often see posts about chasers reaching new milestones, Shack Sloth, Multiple Sloth, Super Sloth, etc., and congratulations are certainly due to all the dedicated chasers out there. It occurred to me the other day that there’s an inverse version of this for activators - how many chaser points an activator has provided, so to speak, to chasers. I.e. how many points have been accumulated by all chasers contacted during all the activations for a given activator.

Unless I’m missing something, this isn’t a number that’s directly available on the database site but there is a straightforward way to get an estimate. The database “Activator Log" page has columns for “QSOs” and peak “Points” for each activation, so select “All Entries”, copy and paste the resulting log to a spreadsheet, multiply Qs X Points and sum the results. It only took a minute or two to do this for my own log and, to my surprise, I found the result was over 110K chaser points given out! Who knew. :slight_smile:

This isn’t an exact number since chasers only receive points once per summit per day. However, the number is a maximum and can be adjusted for a better estimate. For example, I’d guess that knocking the max number down by 10% would give a pretty good estimate for an activator who does mostly individual activations with a group outing now and then and does not typically receive many duplicate contacts.

Anyway, just thought this might be an interesting exercise for activators.

73,

Mike - ke5akl

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Hi Mike:
With about 20 months difference, we’ve got the same thoughts.
See my post of October 2015.

Cheers,

Guru

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Hi Guru,

Great minds think alike… :slight_smile:

Before posting I looked around on the reflector to see whether anyone had broached this before but didn’t run across your post. What interested me was the idea that this is a number for activators that’s on the same basic scale as chaser points. Since it’s so easy to generate the estimate I wasn’t really angling for a new direct database count for the actual points, just thought it might be interesting for activators to check into.

Personally, if there’s one number not currently available I’d really like to see it’s the count of initial peak activations for an activator. This seems to me something that’s at the very heart of the activity but not knowable in any easy way from the database. The only way I’ve come up to check this is to go to the summit page for each unique peak activated and see if who the first activator was. Very tedious.

73,

Mike

PS. Thanks for all the contacts - it’s always exciting to work another continent from a peak.

Such a number (first activator) will not be available from the database for a simple reason.

There can only ever be one first activator for a summit. Once activated, nobody else can ever be the first activator. This means that someone entering into SOTA activations in England now, 14years after SOTA started would not be able to get any first activations as all the English summits have been activated many times. They’re not be able to get on the table of first activations, not because they lacked skill in hill walking or mountaineering, or skill in operating radios, but for the fact they were not around when the program started. Worse, nothing they do in becoming a better mountaineer or operator will change the fact they were not first.

It’s just about inevitable, when developing databases, that you end up with fields you later wish you’d not included.

( I still have nightmares about the data model developed for the main production system I used to work on. The original data model was constructed with a lot of enthusiasm by folk who were trying to make sure that every conceivable possible use case was covered. The result was a database of hideous complexity with entire tables that ended up never being used. Some of those got re-purposed, but many of them just worked as performance drag. Of course, the data model was so complicated nobody dared to delete un-wanted parts of it for fear the whole edifice would collapse… )