I’m intrigued by this, it does sound a bit like moving goal posts. When the summits are removed, do activators and chasers lose their points for them? If someone has attained,say shack sloth or mountain goat as a result of them, do they lose their award?
No.
No.
The summits were valid at the time. Then on one day they stop being valid. You can still claim points retrospectively should you forget to ever log anything.
Sorry, Rod, I wasn’t paying proper attention as I was trying to follow events here whilst preparing and cooking a sweet and sour chicken meal! I got you mixed up with someone else.
Brian
[quote=“G0CQK, post:33, topic:10456”]
No - only new summits unless we questioned a specific existing summit.
[/quote] This is definitely not true because we submitted all the required data, i.e. col height and coordinates for the new summits and and were still repeatedly asked to complete the entire summits list. Since there is hardly any col information available for Austria (apart from a list prepared by Mark Trengrove covering the higher summits only) I spent hundreds of hours - I repeat hundreds of hours - trying to find col information on the internet before Peter ON4UP offered to do a Landserf evaluation for us.
73, Sylvia OE5YYN
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Have you got hold of the wrong end of the stick? You clearly are not in the doghouse with the MT because you are still here and posting!
Sorry, Mike, that’s nonsense. Firstly because I do not kill threads like that, it is against my principles. Secondly because for at least the last seven years there has existed alternative debate forums preceding the one that you post on. Note that the forum that you post on gives a very distorted view of SOTA because firstly it carefully excludes not only members of the MT but members of their families, and secondly if anyone comments in favour of the stance of the MT he gets abused and called a cuckoo. As I say, you get more freedom here.
How can you listen to the opinions of people who don’t express opinions? Should I also listen to the unstated opinions of those who disagree with you? If you cannot accept that the very fact that you are freely posting here proves that there is no reason to be frightened then you are brave to the point of foolhardiness.
Brian
I think this thread is the solution to the worlds energy crisis …
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Yes and the great thing is that the same comments and discussion gets recycled every few years. The energy will never run out!
73 Marc G0AZS
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Hi Mark, I believe you are wrong in referring to the 100m prominence as being an error. It’s not an error, at the time prominence was applied in DL/DM (and elsewhere) that was the rule at the time. I believe this rule can still be applied to new associations who perhaps wouldn’t have any 150m prominence summits and hence applying 150m in such new applications would exclude the possible new association and I thought SOTA was abut INCLUSION not EXCLUSION.
I have seen the descrepancy in the use of a prominence value between e.g. Australian associations and German ones as there’s more mountains in Germany than Australia, however I go back to my first point, what we have here is not the correction of an error, rather a change to the rules (whether justified or not, I do not wish to comment) being applied to a particular association.
Ed.
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I am one the the participants who started to have some outdoor activity after years (decades in my case) of sedentary life, and discovered a totally new aspect of the ham radio hobby thanks to the SOTA award scheme.
I am only willing (and able) to activate very easily accessible summits, and I think any step that reduces the number of SOTA summits (with exception of duplicates, etc.) is a step in the wrong direction.
Less summits means less opportunities to participate and have fun for everyone, activators and chasers.
On the other hand, it would only be fair to reward better the activators who actually have to make special efforts, in the same spirit as the winter bonus that takes in account the extra difficulty during that season. Long or difficult walks could be somehow rewarded too.
If the rules have to evolve, shouldn’t we consider creating an extra “bonus” category that would reflect the actual difficulty ?
I appreciate the MT have certainly evaluated this option when designing the current rules, and had excellent reasons to publish them as they stand now. However, should there be some need to modify the rules or to “correct” the way they have been interpreted in some regions, I would suggest to go for maximum fun for everyone and more recognition of the efforts.
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Hi Rob - you have DM in the table twice - should one be DL (Alpine) ? Or is this a comparison on what would is and what will be for DM? In which case how is DL affected please?
Ed.
Hi Christophe,
I agree whole heartedly that the scoring doesn’t reflect the summit difficulty but this has been discussed before and the question alwys comes back how? While one persons opinion may be that a particular summit is hard to achieve (as he/she is old (like me) or unfit (like me)) but someone else would say it’s a walkover.
As it is the heights in different associations get different amounts of points. So I can activate a DM summit and get 4 points for it, while the summit at the other side of the valley at the same height in DL only gets 1 point. This I find unfair. (it also happens between VK1 and VK2 in Australia by the way - and I’m sure elsewhere).
Another point to think about is why do chasers get the same points as an activator? If an activator has climbed to the top of tall mountain, he deserves his 10 points but being on the top of a mountain makes it easy for the chaser to receive the signals, The inverse is also true. An activator on a low hill gets 1 point as it could be an easy summit, but being low down it’s harder for the chaser to hear the station (OK not always, but for this discussion lets say we’re talking about 2m FM activations). In effect the points should be the inverse - when an activator gets 10 points, the chaser should only get 1 and when the activator gets 1 point the chaser should get 10.
But how on earth can you implement this (especially rescoring all previous points) - it’s just too complicated. The system we have is not perfect, but getting a better one would require a large investment of time and money and there’s no gaurentee that at the end it would be any better!
My moral, is use what we have and do the best we can.
73 Ed.
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That’s easy to answer. They get the same points because they are just as important as activators.
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Gentlemen, this is not in accordance with our AUP. I am going to use the facilities of Discourse to temporarily lock this thread down for a cooling off period. I will announce when the thread is open again for discussion, when I will expect everyone to keep it reasoned and respectful.
Brian (wearing his moderators hat.)
The thread is now re-opened. Keep it moderate, guys, please!
A couple of quick answers to open proceedings:
DD5LP asked "why do chasers get the same points as activators? Going back to the early days of SOTA there were no pile-ups of eager chasers, sometimes you had to work hard to get four contacts. Giving the chasers the same points as the activators helped motivate the chasers. It also avoided the difficult question of how otherwise to reward the chasers, and the need for a separate column of chaser points. And after all, what does it matter - chasers look at other chasers scores, activators look at other activators scores.
ON6ZQ asked shouldn’t we consider creating an extra bonus category that would reflect the actual difficulty? Setting aside that one man’s easy day out is another man’s nightmare, we have to consider that many summits have more than one route up them- for instance GW/NW-001 has at least eight named routes up it, covering a wide range of difficulty. We would have to evaluate each route, assign a difficulty to it, then decide on what points to allocate to ad hoc routes like ascending via the Parson’s Nose Arete. This could become such a mammoth task that the KISS principle becomes the best approach.
Various contributors brought up the point of why a summit of a given height should score more in one Association than in an adjacent Association. In an Association the scale of points roughly equates to effort and difficulty in that Association, it is not intended to be universally comparable. Why should that be? Because the best minds in SOTA wrestled with the problem of designing a single world-wide points scale and failed. It would be easier if every ascent started at sea level, if every starting point around a mountain was at the same height, but in reality things are not that tidy - the valleys in the Himalaya are at the same height as the summits of the Alps. Again, KISS is our friend - and after all SOTA has been going well for so long that it would be silly to change everything now!
With that said, the thread is now open.
Brian
Thank you Brian for the clear answers.
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About the “difficulty bonus” idea, there would be no need to evaluate all routes ,etc. If a summit requires a “real” effort to be activated even using the easiest route, then it would qualify. I agree it still can be subject to discussion, but it could be enough to say something like “requires at least one hour walk for an average walker”.
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About the summits that do not meet prominence criteria, if something really has to be done, I would suggest to reduce their “value” to 1 point instead of just deleting them, so that people could still enjoy them.
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Thanks. All suggestions get considered by the MT, these will be discussed.
Brian
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Hi Christophe
The idea of a difficulty score has been discussed many times. One person’s “real effort” is a walk in the park for others. I do think that a reward for a difficult day out activating is appropriate though. That’s what pubs were invented for!
73 Richard G3CWI
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What could be analized is to apply the bands of points to heigths to the regions instead to whole associations, as an option, as even a small one as ours has very different zones, sometimes starting at almost sea level or at 800m ASL. “Au contraire”, some close summits on different associations can see their points almost doubled, given the heights band forks of each association, as related to each highest summits.
73 de Mikel
Realistically, a system that has been in place for 13 years, now in over 100 international associations and the basis of achievements of thousands of participants from the Alps to the Netherlands, from South East England to the Rocky Mountains, isn’t going to suddenly get completely redesigned.
It’s fair. The same summits with the same points are available to us all. We just need to go on a few holidays - or sit in the shack and be a chaser.
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Hi, Tom
I guess nobody is asking for neither suddenly nor completely changing the rules. I think all of us like SOTA, mountains and radio, and just trying to improve how to do it, and giving some ideas to make it better.
Of course that all the summits are the same for everybody, but perhaps not all of us are able to afford the expenses to travel around the world to activate them. At least, I can’t.
I think also that all of us are conscious of how hard could be even a small change on such a wide and complex structure, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be changed anyway at any speed.
All this said within a positive spirit of improvement. I would want to see my son hiking for points and joy on the future, not too far, I hope!
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