Japan joins SOTA

If you look in an ARM you’ll see what goes in the ARM, you need to produce that info for both locals and visitors. Then you need to locate the P150 summits, the summit coords. and the col coords. When you know the spread of summits you can work out the height bands and if a summer or winter bonus is needed. Write it all up and work with the MT to verify the summit data. Lather, rinse, repeat a few times to work out the errors. Then it gets uploaded and you can go and activate the summits.

If you contact Rob G0HRT, he can provide you with the necessary docs that describe the process.

TIARA is still around, although “active” is a relative term. It’s probably the biggest community of English speaking hams in Japan, even though a lot of members on the mailing list aren’t actually in Japan any more

Cheers,
Andrew

In addition, the SOTA MT like to have a local Association Manager, based on previous experiences. It took me longer to find the local AM than it did to survey the summits :slight_smile:

Oh crap, that’s me too! :smile:

now contains the promised post!

Cheers,
Andrew
VK3ARR

2 Likes

Nice Blog Andrew.

A fantastic effort by you and the rest of the team. Hearty congratulations to all involved.
And you found time to do some activations while all this was in-train!

I don’t play golf so some of those summits will remain out of bounds for me. A No 9 iron I thought was suitable for light duty plumbing soldering. And the wood that I hear golfers referring to is presumably on the side of the fairway for getting lost in. Better go before I tee off too many folk.

Looking forward to adding Japanese summits to my chaser list. Thanks again.

73
Ron
VK3AFW

Thanks Andrew for your magnificent effort and time. JA is a similar time zone so hopefully as things progress they shall start appearing on the bands.

Perhaps SOTA may be attractive to the younger set for whom adventuring on mountain peaks with a world wide audience will be seen as a challenge.

Rgds, Nick

A truly marvellous effort, all involved are to be congratulated.

I personally find this to be less informative than using a convention like “Point 1587” or similar, to denote that the summit in question has no name, but is at a height of 1587 meters (or feet…). What do others here think?

Rob

GM Rob,

Yes, there was some discussion by the JA Team about the SOTA “name” for those “unnamed” peaks.

In the States, where an official USGS Geonames has not been assigned, the summit takes the elevation as the “official” name in the Geonames database, e.g. 1752. This is not the same outside of the USA.

We could have used the elevation as the SOTA “name” but thought it would be confusing to the Japanese and consequently chose the Ref Nr instead.

Clearly, there are many JA SOTA summits without any name at all. Hopefully, this convention will be understood by our Japanese friends.

Good question. 73, Guy/n7un

No rush Andrew just when you have a spare 5 mins. On a serious note - well done on bring all this together.

73 Glyn

I just looked and didn’t see Mt. Fuji listed. Does anyone know when it will be listed? I plan on going to Japan within the next couple years and was hoping to activate it.

Tim
K6TW

http://sotawatch.org/summits.php?summit=JA/SZ-001 (Fujisan Kengamine)

Kengamine is the highest point on the crater rim at the top of Fujisan.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~ud6m-kizm/N_P_I_J/Fuji/Fuji_san.html

wunder

http://www.sotadata.org.uk/summitReport2.aspx?returnUrl=SummitReport.aspx&summitid=79027
http://sotawatch.org/summits.php?summit=JA/SZ-001

My view is perhaps tarnished by being “raised” in the VK system, but essentially, a convention should be made, and it should hold across the world. If not, associations come up with their own convention. Some countries measure altitude in feet, some in meters, so “Point XXXXX” is bound to be confusing or misapplied. I recall hearing that some associations in the US originally gave ‘naming rights’ to unnamed summits, hence you have summits like “Dipole Hill”.

It’s the least worst option. Obligatory xkcd cartoon: xkcd: Standards

Having said that, in the JA associations, about a third of the “unnamed” summits truly have no name. The rest have Japanese names that can be misread by those less skilled in the art of Kanji. I asked some JA work colleagues to name Tokyo and Ishikawa prefectures’ summits and they came back with a “correct” list but felt it was very difficult to know what the actual name was, given some of the characters had many readings.

Based on that, we figured it was better to get the list out with as many names as possible, rather than making sure everything was named. We hope to update the list next year with many more as we bring more Japanese into the SOTA fold.

…and it’s also the first

It’s also the first listing on my blog post. 5,276 summits and we somehow missed the tallest mountain in Japan? :smile:

Not within an Association, surely? I mean, OK an Association may be non-metric so that point XXXX will be in feet, but so will the rest of the summits be in that Association, so the chance of confusion or misapplication is minimal. The “Point XXXX” convention has been in use for a very long time around the world so why change it?

Brian

If SOTA is one association, then yes, it will be consistent. But SOTA isn’t, which is a good thing. The fact remains that there isn’t consistency around the world. In W4C, W4C/EM-058 is named simply “3730”. In other NA associations, the Point XXXX (ft) notation is used. In VK, that same summit would be Point 1137.

I’m not saying I like the whole “VK3/VC-032” as a summit name, but in terms of a method that works across all associations, regardless of how they measure altitude, it does work.

In any case, the approach we were going to take with the Japan associations was different, but the SOTA MT told us to use the Summit Ref method :wink:

Wow, wow, wow. I am speechless, amazing work by all those involved. I am feeling guilty as I did not contribute anything and could not even join the meeting with the team that put it all together last time they got together in Tokyo. Sadly work and personal events have kept pinned down as of late. I can’t start to imagine the amount of work that has goe into this. I will check it out and give some feedback regarding summit names etc to see if I can help… With regards to summit names, if it is not listed on the maps, local knowledge is your friend, so I am sure those un-named summits will get resolved over time. This is giving me a lot of excuses to go hiking and enjoy some radio operating :-).

Japan is a very mountainous country shaped by the violent forces of nature and there will be loads of summits to activate. The Japanese have a great mountain hiking/climbing culture as well so I am sure it will interest a lot of people.

TIARA is alive and kicking and very active with a great bunch of Japanese and foreign operators alike. My first elmers were are TIARA members and I owe them a lot of gratitude for their selfless help. Being quite active, they are in fact preparing a special commemorative operation soon (in august). I do not want to let the cat out of the bag yet until I know it is ok, but I’ll keep you posted on that one. I am a member of TIARA, but for the same reasons as listed above I have not been able to join the meetings recently. I will bring this development to their attention.

I will be in France again this august hoping to active a few more summits. It would be neat if I can S2S with JA at that time!!!

Again, great job to all those involved and many thanks!

I am quite familiar with the Niigata area of Honshu. I have a flat there and used to do quite a bit of hiking / backcountry skiing and snowboarding in that area. I think I can help with some names.

How should I procedd to help with names? Also I noticed that we could add quite a few summits there (although I am not entirely 100% sure about the rules that defines a summit, but I’ll educate myself).

Should I contact somebody directly or put it in a post?

Cheers,
Arnaud

Ahhhh, it’s all there: