After my very first activation this Saturday on a very accessible summit (ON/ON-027), I already learned many lessons for my future activations.
While I enjoy experimenting with the station set-up, and making the contacts, I really did not like to spend the remaining of my week-end wrestling with the related administration: reading my awful handwriting (even when my hands are not frozen as they were on site) to input the QSO’s in my logging software, guessing the times I had not written down during the QSO’s, uploading the relevant records with a new call (these are my first QSO’s logged as ON6ZQ/P), to eQSL (with an “attached” callsign), and Lotw (with the required new certificate).
Having finally managed that, I discovered that the upload of the logs to the SOTA database requires yet another format. Searching for a ready-made converter only gave me “404 not found errors”.
So I decided to write a converter that will at least save me the manual entry of the QSO’s of my future activations.
As the work to write the program for local use and the the work to put it on-line were nearly equivalent, I published it on
In reply to ON6Z
I use, as many others do also, the software written by F6ENO for ADIF to CSV uploading:-
ADI2SOTA_V4_5.exe
I don’t know about activators but it works great for SOTA chaser logs.
Damian M0BKV
I had indeed found this software mentioned at several places, but all the links point to a missing page (404 not found) ;-( I would appreciate it if someone could tell me where to download it from.
While at it, I also wrote a converter from CSV (as downloaded from SOTAdata) to ADIF:
By the way, for those interested, I also made GPX files that contain the GPS coordinates of the summits in a format that can be easily uploaded to GPS sets or to smartphones. On smartphones, some applications will even import the summits as way-points just by entering the URL of the GPX file.