Yesterday I enjoyed another beautiful field day, I say this mainly for the wonderful spring weather we had here and the new chance to cross briefly our antennas.
Avoiding channel saturation created by the largest international contest during last weekend, I decided to use the WARC bands to perform my activation from “Dos Hermanas, EA2/NV131”.
Everything was great, until I was interrupted by the cries of a “person”, emphasizing that I could not use these bands and inviting me to do QSY.
I repeated several times to identify himself but received no response, only was repeating to do QSY like an angry cat. As you will understand I just up 25Khz but I felt hurt.
We know contest activity shall not take place on these HF bands (30, 17 and 12m), SOTA is an award scheme for radio amateurs but I am not sure if it can be considered also a little contest.
Perhaps the way I used to announce my activation was not correct…“CQ SOTA, CQ SOTA Contest…” this could have created confusion.
Maybe this point has been discussed in other sections into the reflector before but I would like to share this event with you to try to find an appropriate response.
Thanks, 73s de Inaki
SOTA is an award scheme like IOTA and DXCC. It is not a contest and is therefore perfectly acceptable on the WARC bands. Ignore anyone who thinks otherwise!
Yep, that’d confuse me. 
SOTA’s not a contest, so please don’t call it one. “CQ SOTA” or “CQ Summits On The Air” is sufficient.
73, Rick M0LEP
Rick is right. I missed that you had included “contest” in your CQ. That was the problem - SOTA is not a contest so just call CQ SOTA.
Specially on CQ WW SSB contest days, when people uses the WARCs as a peaceful shelter away from the “CONTEST” shouts!
Vy 73 de Mikel
It is clear, I am agree that was my mistake, I used the wrong word for introduce my activation.
Thanks, 73s
I have noticed several IDIOTS giving comments without their call sign over the last couple of weeks. These are pirates as they do not give their call sign as their licence regulations say that they should (no matter which country they are from, it is a requirement to give your call sign at the start of a QSO).
There also seems to be more people tuning up on frequency or whistling or, as I heard today, playing music over a SOTA activator.
Yes it’s contest time again and these Idiots have crawled out of their holes to play…
Best way to deal with Idiots is to ignore them but generally, signalwise an activator is at a disadvantage as he/she is often running QRP with a non-directional antenna.
Here’s hoping these PITA operators get a life someday.
73 Ed.
Actually, this isn’t strictly true in all jurisdictions. The FCC rules for the amateur service in the USA state the following:
(a) Each amateur station, except a space station or telecommand station, must transmit its assigned call sign on its transmitting channel at the end of each communication, and at least every 10 minutes during a communication, for the purpose of clearly making the source of the transmissions from the station known to those receiving the transmissions.
Sorry to be pedantic. It is actually kind of bizarre how widely the ID (and other) requirements for amateur operation vary from country to country.
Of course, this still does not excuse the ignorant behavior mentioned above!
—73 Karl KA3RCS