I want to present a draft idea I’ve got for a future challenge.
The aim of the challenge would be the promotion of activating and chasing to as many SOTA participants as possible.
We currently have:
colleagues which do activate summits and chase from a base station,
colleagues which are activating only and
colleagues which are chasing only.
The challenge I’m proposing would encourage chaser-only hams to go out and activate, as well as activator-only hams to do chasing.
Chasing could be carried out from a base station, as well as from a /P station or a /M.
Of course the S2S QSOs would sum up for this purpose.
The idea for the challenge could be to look at the number of SOTA completes some ham has achieved in a period of time, either counting the number of completed summits themselves or the total number of points gathered with all the completed summits and their worthed points.
This challenge will mainly promote local QSOs for sure but there may well be an international completes bonus for people willing to chase distant summits in areas where he/she will travel to in a future time.
This bonus may even help promote the travelling of hams aiming to activate summits which they have previously chased, thus promoting a frenetic activating and chasing activity in a given period of time.
Well, this is my idea and I throw it away for your to think and comment about it.
Let’s see how you like it and how feasible it seems to the writing code and database management guys.
There is already a SOTA Complete Award, see the Shop, this is the description given there:
“SOTA Complete Award A summit is scored as �complete� if it has been both activated and chased by the participant Scoring will be based on the same criteria as the Activator and Chaser �Unique Summits� awards; i.e. Any summit may be counted only once as a scoring summit for this award, there is no time limit and any valid summit (at the time of the activation and chase even if now deleted from the summits lists) will count The award will consist of a certificate endorsed with the number of completed summits and awards may be claimed at 100, 250, 500, 1000 (and upwards) summits.”
For my own entertainment I am pursuing “Association Completes” with the idea of Chasing all the summits in any given Association, and I know that some activators are working to complete all the summits in various Associations. This could be formalised.
It’s true and I know there’s a SOTA Complete award, but there are also awards to reward activators and chasers based on the scores they have achieved after adding all the points of the summits they have activated and/or chased.
Being all these three mentionned awards on-going ones with no time limit, my idea with the proposed challenge is to run something like a specific Complete Award but within a short period of time (1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year… it’s up to us) in order to promote that hams around the SOTA program go out to activate summits no matter the times they have activated them before and all those which are not chasing currently, start doing so.
Another Completes award based idea I’ve got but I decided not to present is a S2S complete challenge consisting in working S2S from one summit #1 to other summit #2 and working S2S from summit #2 to summit #1. The problem I see with this is that it leaves chaser-only colleagues out of the game and I think it’s better trying something that aims to involve everyone or as many as possible in both sides of the SOTA activity, i.e. chasing and activating.