New Association and Updates 1st December 2015

New associations for December 2015 are

ZL1 - New Zealand - North Island
LZ - Bulgaria

Updated associations

YO
W0D
S5
OE
LX

There is an outstanding update to VK4 to remove incorrect bonus points. We did update VK4 last October but it didn’t do what I expected. I’ll force it tomorrow.

Please join me in welcoming our new associations and also thank the summits team and all the AMs who have worked on these changes.

Here’s a pretty picture for ZL1:

I think at least one activator is in the starting blocks…

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Great news about ZL1. Thanks to those who made it happen.

ZL is really perfectly situated for those of us in eastern VK, so plenty of s2s possibilities on top of those from JA. A great couple of months.

Andrew

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This is exciting stuff, since the sun rises in ZL before it does in VK much of the year. Now maybe I can work a kiwi activator, having failed many dozens of times to work even a single VK activator with my only antenna, a vertical.

Elliott, K6EL

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Welcome a board LZ and ZL1!

Sota activations are an addict and amusing activity. Enjoy !

73

And they’re off!

Only managed one QSO before having to pack up and head back down to catch my flight (now delayed…), but that counts as an activation. I shall just have to forgo the solitary point.

Cheers,
Andrew

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Thanks to all those for their work in making this happen. Will look forward to S2S and new uniques.

Cheers, Nick

ZL first activated by a VK - sweet!

I see the LZ is up on the database summit log section but not the summits bit yet.
Good work folks :slight_smile:

ohhh look at all those lovely virgin summits from Bulgaria.

karl

Fantastic work!
I seem to have spent most of the morning looking at ways to sneak 2 or 3 ‘easy’ one pointers (maybe even a 4 pointer - oh the giddy heights… :wink: ) and make an early holiday next year even more hectic :smile:

Thanks to everyone who has been working so hard to put these, and all the others together!

Must go do some ‘work’ now…

Don
m0hcu

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Looking forward to hearing more about an Alaskan association.

Alan WL7CG

OK, the VK4 bonus problem has been sorted.

There was a bug in the utility we use to upload summits in bulk to the DB itself. The result was some associations got bonus points that were not meant for those associations. VK4 was one of the associations. I did think that a simple re-upload would fix the bonus issue but it didn’t so the invalid bonus points stuck around.

I have just forcefully removed the VK4 bonus points from 130 summits which means VK4 should be OK now. There haven’t been too many VK4 activations and only 1 person is affected by the bonus being correct. Sorry to VK3MCD who will have lost 3 points but now has a correct score.

I’ve spent an hour chasing my tail wondering why my DB backup was restoring corrupted summit names. I found this after installing the latest source and tools on a laptop and was puzzled at the broken YO names. The latest DB backup has correct names in the correct character set. Was the backup randomly corrupted? Did I fail to set some important collation/locale parameters when setting up the tools? There was a lot of head scratching. I then remembered we updated YO last night and so this was the first time it has been touched with the uploader that doesn’t break UTF-8 encoded names. So no bugs in the backup which is always good to know. :wink:

Alan,

It will probably be a few months for the SOTA MT summits team to do their verification examination. KLA-Anchorage will be first (10k summits!) followed by KLF-Fairbanks and KLS-Southeast. With over 18k+ summits, there is understandably a lot of work yet to be done by the SOTA MT team. The first of the month is usually the announcement for new Associations…keep watch! And of course, stay warm in AK! Guy/n7un

Welcome the LZ and ZL1 (our antipodes)
I’ll be looking forward to chasing some of your SOTAs soon.
Thanks a lot to all the team doing the hard work in the backstage for us to have even more fun.
Best 73 de Guru

Thanks to all concerned…

Dave VK4DD
AM for VK4

Guy,

Thanks for the info. Those may be a long way from me. We are 310 road miles from Anchorage and 350 from Fairbanks. You can’t drive to Juneau from here :slight_smile:

There are a huge number of summits around my QTH and several (many) that would be difficult to access. Hopefully Wrangell-St Elias Park and Preserve is covered by one of the groups, that is nearby.

I will be watching. Are there any Alaska contacts for these associations?

Great to hear back on this.

73

Yes! The Wrangle Borough has 317 SOTA summits listed so far. For those not familiar with Alaska, the Wrangle-St Elias National Park is the largest in the USA at over 13.2 million acres!
See https://goo.gl/HLyOdC But this area is in the KLS-Southeast Association which will probably be ready by summertime hiking!

I used to live on Wrangell Island in Southeast Alaska and still have a house there. The City of Wrangell formed a Borough government a few years ago and it takes in the island and land as far south as Meyers Chuck. It is all very mountainous on the islands and along the border. It is maybe 800 air miles from my QTH.

Wrangell - St Elias Park and Preserve is in Southcentral Alaska. It butts up against Prince William Sound where I live to the southwest and the Canadian border to the east and southeast. Part of it is in the Valdez-Cordova Census Area. We don’t have a Borough in Valdez. Kluane National Park and Preserve in Canada shares a common border with Wrangell - St Elias Park.

Nine of the 16 highest peaks in the US are within the Park.

It will be fun to see this develop.

73