It’s down to the multiplicative scoring, and I figure activating unique summits is likely to be the more tightly constrained number, because there are only so many unique summits any one activator can activate in a year. I’d guess there may be a few activators who get past 300 unique summits, but it’s probably quite a challenge to average more than one unique summit a day throughout the year.
The number of unique contacts is trickier to guestimate. Set yourself up as a SOTA-compliant station for a field day weekend, and you might get a thousand or more in one go, if the band’s playing nicely and you have a big battery. You probably wouldn’t manage that number of unique calls every weekend, though, if only because those sorts of events tend to involve the usual suspects and after the first two or three you’ll have caught them all. Even if the summer brings out lots of fair weather chasers and the band opens up really nicely, I figure it will be hard for a SOTA activator to get past 5000 unique contacts on 10 metres in a year.
Putting those two together suggests the top activator score might be somewhere around 1,750,000 points, if someone’s crazy enough. Even a million would be pretty wild…
I think you’re correct Rick regarding contest/field day stations. I worked 35 contest stations on 3rd Mar this year out of the 54 stations I worked on 28MHz. The others were regular SOTA chasers and I’d guess I’d worked many of them before. I wrote at the time that contests are normally a pain but not this time, all those nice loud US stations were a bonus
The interest and activity so far in the 10m Challenge massively exceeds what I thought may happen based on the 12m challenge in the past.
Likewise Brian, zilch from Stavros on 10m and he was well down on 20m too at 09:18z - despite me having a new beam in the air, the Optibeam 10-5M. You can’t beat the propagation!
Well, I’ve always tried to participate in the challenges, because if people have taken the trouble to think them up and implement them, then I’d like to support that.
This one has been particularly interesting to me, partly because I have done little on 10m before, and partly because the small and quickly deployed antenna fitted very well with my “winter bonus” activations in cold weather.
Changing conditions are maintaining interest, and the multiplier system brings showers of points. And what do points mean…? Well, nothing really, but that’s human psychy for you!
At the time he was on the 3000km MUF was under 28MHz, so presumably, the MUF to SV/ST-098 from UK was well under. I could just hear Fredi FH/HB9BHU/P on FH/GT-002 on Mayotte this morning, maybe 419 at best, but with the QSB he turned out not to be workable.
The “unique summits” value is rather less constrained for chasers, so I’d expect that to get much larger than it can for activators. The “unique activators” is going to be the smaller number, but could still easily end up at a thousand or more for a chaser with a big HF station. That’d go a long way towards building a multi-million score…
Not that often I give an activator an S9+ report, but the 10 metres path between UK and Greece was booming through yesterday early afternoon.
Paths to VK, JA and North America, on the other hand, weren’t…
I’ve been finding beam headings between about 90º and 200º seem not too bad, but from 210º all the way round past zero to 80º seldom produce anything useful. Some of that’s not helped by my local geography. There’s a lot of hill immediately behind me between about 190º and 260º. I guess that at present headings northwards between 280º and 80º involve paths going closer to the pole and at present the ionisation in northern latitudes isn’t yet supporting 10 metres propagation reliably.
Interesting propagation. I worked 2 on 10m, Roger MW0IDX/P and Andy G8CPZ/P. Andy was almost visible, Roger was weak but workable in GW, I was near Penrith on Dufton Pike. KX2+ inv L EFHW. Afterwards I went to John G3WGV’s QTH where using a rather spiffing antenna and SDR setup, Cuba, Thailand, Philippines were all worked on 10m CW. There was propagation but you needed a good antenna. ISTR we were running 200-400W only. The Easter Island mob 3G0??? were being spotted by Eu stations but we couldn’t hear them on any band.
Yesterday, I got just three 10 metre SOTA chases. GW/NW-060 was not too hard, and obviously groundwave, EA8/TF-006 was borderline with deep QSB, and SV/AT-018 was armchair copy. Others I listened for were at best partially readable. I only have 100 watts and a hexbeam, so better than a dipole (and can be pointed the right way) but probably not by all that much. I havn’t tried listening for Easter Island, but I’ve noticed latitude seems to make a lot of difference at this time of year…
There had been a major CME impact on Friday, triggering a G3 geomagnetic storm, with Kp=7.0, and yesterday the ionosphere was still recovering, paths through the auroral zone were likely to be rather poor. I hope things will be back to near normal today but more impacts are likely from a very active complex of sunspots. Unfortunately I was unavailable for chasing yesterday so I missed the fun!
Conditions on all bands were bleedin’ diabolical today. I got a 10m multiplier on Dufton Pike (unique #495) but High Rigg (unique #496) and Lord’s Seat (unique #497) were hard work and 10m-free
You’re actually prepared to leave a summit without collecting the Challenge multiplier? I can’t do that, even if it means cancelling a later summit from the agenda!
I had to get to Creetown before 1800. And it started spotting with drops of rain which became drizzle on the descent which became a monsoon driving on the A66 back to the M6. So glad I didn’t stay. And conditions were utter nonsense Tom, like 5years back at the sunspot minimum
