With the on-going project to add a third character to the Association designator for summits in W4 and W5, I note that affected summits in the “Recent Summit Info” now return the message " Error: summit not recognised".
As it would be a shame to lose such a valuable resource, I hope that there is an action on somebody to ensure that the links are restored.
73 de Les, G3VQO
Thanks for the heads-up Les. I’ll let Jon GM4ZFZ know. Please let me know if you find any other dark corners of the SOTA online world that haven’t managed to follow the updates.
Tom M1EYP
In reply to G3VQO:
The info is there Les, what I think is happening is we changed the refs after the info was entered. So the activator entered the info when the summt was W5/xxx and that is what is listed. The the summits were renumbered so it became W5N/xxxx. Clicking on the link tries to take you to W5/xxx not W5N/xxx. I think given just a few more days all the old W5 links will drop off the recents summits list and then the problem will go away.
If you look at the summit page in question via the Summits link on SOTAwach you can read the entry.
There are a few other minor tweaks needing to be done still. Fiddly things that will get done as and when there’s time. But their absense doesn’t impact massively on operation of the programme and they certainly don’t disadvantage anyone.
Andy
MM0FMF
In reply to M1EYP:
I noticed today that SOTAwatch Spotlite limits the association field to 2 characters on both the “Post a spot” and “Post an alert” forms. This should have already affected Spain and Canada; do they not use Spotlite?
Speaking of Spotlite, I noticed the “View spots” and “View alerts” pages omit the “/” from the summit reference making things run together a little bit. I also noticed that while there is a “View recent spots” link at the top of the Spot form, there is no similar “View alerts” link on the Alert form. Maybe these links could be placed on the main page for easier access. I know I like to check it (if I can) while on the hill to look for any S2S opportunities.
Doug, ND9Q
In reply to ND9Q:
Very few people use Spotlite. It was provided as a low bandwidth web page for early mobile phones that had limited browsers. With most phones offering full browsers the overwhelming majority of users just use SOTAwatch direct. Spotlite is used by my SMS based spotting services as it provides a simpler interface for my software to use. The limit of association length is a limit of the web page not the Spotlite API as 3 character association spots pass through with no problem. I’ll mention in to Jon who runs these web servers to fix this.
Andy
MM0FMF
EDIT: He’s fixed it within 2hrs of mailing him! Tks Jon. 
In reply to MM0FMF:
EDIT: He’s fixed it within 2hrs of mailing him! Tks Jon.
And within a few hours of him fixing it, I used it to self-spot on W4C/US-001 during the 1 minute or so that I was able to find cell service!
Doug, ND9Q
