P150 and the ridge riddle

I know, the rule is the rule. I may disagree with it, find it illogical, but it is the only thing which I can do. Or can I write to the Reflector. Too long did I read some threads about my riddle, too long for being able to realize that it is not meaningless.

So, what is the matter? I live in the centre of the Czech Moravian Highland. There is not a lot of distinct hills with P150, because the country is ridgy.
When activating and perceiving our nice lanscape I am often flexing my brain with following problem, which represents the real conditions:
Let us have the west-east oriented mountain ridge which is formed by five hills, each of them fulfilling P150 by itself and having more than 800 meters asl. Further, each of the hills is muttualy bounded from the adjacent one with col and each of the cols is deeper than 50 meters. The shortest and easiest way to reach the outer westmost hill of the ridge from the eastmost one leads through four cols and three hills and is 12 km long. Thus the total cumulative distinct climb is more than 200 meters. An alternative way how to „conquer“ the westmost hill is to climb on it first, but this is another story.

My question is based upon the second paragraph of the Guidelines for the definition of a Summit. I cite: „This principle ensures that there is a distinct climb associated with every Summit“.

Is there any way how to include in such cases, when a distinct climb associated with every activating is ensured, both outer hills of the distinct ridge in SOTA program? Is there any way to credit cumulative climb?

There is not a lot of P150 hills in my countryside and both outer rock ribbed hills are very spectacular, at least from the viewpoint of scenic attractrions.
I think, it would be by far nicer to have both chances of SOTA activation. In my opinion it is much more interesting and attractive than the repetitive radio visits of only one hill strictly selected from the extensive mountain ridges having relatively shallow cols in light of simple and clear P150 rule…

Karel OK2BWB

SOTA has to be objective. Whatever the rule is, always some summits will qualify for the programme and some will not.

You don’t have to avoid a hill because it is not SOTA. The route you describe sounds like a wonderful hike, even if some of the tops are not SOTA summits. From time to time, I take a different longer route to a summit than the most obvious one, because I want to enjoy the walk. Sometimes the walks can be undulating, and pass over subsidiary summits en route to the SOTA summits. This is all part of the enjoyment of walking.

Here in England, we have an excellent model for an independently managed regional scheme. It is called WOTA - “Wainwrights on the Air” and was devised by Julian Moss G4ILO when he learned that many of the Lake District Wainwright summits did not qualify as Marilyn summits for SOTA. The programme works really well, and is an example for what can be done by local people wanting their local non-SOTA summits to be part of an amateur radio awards scheme.

See http://www.wota.org.uk

So you could form your own localised xyzOTA programme for your local summits like this, or you could simply enjoy your walks over them.

Tom M1EYP

In reply to OK2BWB:

The P150 rule might seem illogical but it was selected for one very good reason, 150 metres is close to 500 feet. Although metric measurements have been in use in this country for many years, many of the older hams still think in the older units of measurement, so a nice convenient measure that has meaning in both metric and imperial units makes the value easy to remember. In cases where there are few P150 summits in a country we do now permit the use of P100, which would be less easy to remember in imperial units, but at present I don’t think there are any countries with a history of using imperial units that need P100.

50 metres is not really much change in elevation: although it may seem a lot at the end of a hard day in the hills, it is only the same length (more or less) as a climbing rope!

73

Brian G8ADD

In reply to M1EYP and G8ADD:

Basically I agree with it. I like hiking, biking and especially cross-country skiing and I did not want remove any hills from my itineracy for not being SOTA ones. The subject matter of my meditation was the question if there is any possibility of the cumulative climb (not the same lenght as a climbing rope, but quadruple of it!) credit acceptance. I think it would make SOTA more interesting and not less difficult in some cases, mainly in regions, where there are few P150 hills but only distinct ridges.

Karel

In reply to OK2BWB:

It is an attractive idea, Karel, but I have been thinking about it and I think it would be very difficult to put it into practise. The database would have to contain every summit rather than just the SOTA summits, and if you decided to traverse around any of the summits rather than going over them, it will be necessary to devise some way for the database to take this into account. I don’t think we have the computing power available at present, nor the time to draw up the revised ARMs etc, it would be a huge task.

A better approach would be to run an informal table on the reflector, similar to the table for the number of contacts in an activation. If you do that you will find out how much interest there is in the idea.

73

Brian G8ADD