First Activation Report

Back on topic, of course this Discourse facility has the means to hold a poll to sort out allegedly subjective issues once and for all. Why not set one up with the binary options of “Keep” or “Remove” the “First activated by” feature?

But be careful. Don’t do a “Cameron” - and hold a referendum if you can’t cope with the likely result! :smiley:

Think it encourages people to put new summits on. It certainly applied to me. I only started in SOTA in 2011. I’ve actively sought unactivated hills in GM and abroad (all in Spain, so far! But watch this space…). I love doing something new and even better if no one else has yet done it. Does that make me a bad person? :wink:

Well I’ve not had a haggis broth but will look out for it. The others are fine but do find I keep returning to the two mentioned. I think we should work to banish tomato soup from the planet.

The summits list per region on the database defaults to showing you the summits in a region sorted by summitcode. There is a dropdown menu at the top that allows you to sort by oldest or newest activation. It’s there for the very reason you mention, it allows you to select summits to activate that have not been on the air for longest time. Obviously, a small region with active participants will have a rapid turnover. But for GM and SS, the most active of the GM regions there are the following summits which have not been on for over 5 years.

GM/SS-078	Stob Breac		02/Feb/2006	GM4COX
GM/SS-111	Cruach nam Miseag	09/Jun/2007	GM4COX
GM/SS-113	Sgorach Mor		26/Jun/2010	2M0IOB/P	
GM/SS-110	Cruach Neuran		12/Sep/2010	2M0NCM/P

Perhaps first qualified is more appropriate. Personally I don’t understand why an entry of less than the minimum 4 contacts for qualification constitutes a valid log.

(Sand bags, flack jacket and tin hat at the ready…)

I can answer that Gerald (and Jack).

Say the activation had one single QSO (so looking at the extreme case). Say the person worked was a regular participating SOTA chaser, who logged the contact in his/her chaser log. Is that chaser log valid for the chaser section?

If the answer is “Yes”, then the person on the summit must have been an activator, who made an activator QSO. So the summit has been activated.

Did that activator reach the summit and set up with the intention of making less than 4 QSOs, failing the qualification and thus returning with zero points? Of course not, one might expect them to be rather disappointed. Are we now saying that we should stick the boot in and disqualify those 1, 2 or 3 QSOs as well? And should the corresponding chaser claim(s) be disqualified in a reciprocal manner?

If a chaser can chase it, an activator MUST have activated it. End of.

Because it is a valid log. It doesn’t qualify for the activator points on offer, but that is a world away from effectively denying that those 1, 2 or 3 QSOs even took place.

No, you can’t go back on the original rules that were set up as the basis of SOTA. However, as the 4 QSO rule is likely to be a requirement in perpetuity, is not “first qualified” more appropriate than “first activated”?

It may be more appropriate but it’s a bigger pain to determine due to how QSO times are stored. Finding to the nearest day is simple. But then someone would come back and say I logged a QSO 2 mins before the other person so I should be first qualfier not him.

So it’ll be staying based on first QSO logged.

No, I don’t think so. The first activation is the one that corresponds to the first chase, not the first qualification.

In any case, the number of instances where the first activation is not the same as the first qualification will be very small - but in those small number of cases the first activation trumps the first qualification because that is the first SOTA QSO from that summit.