Continuing the discussion from 2026 SOTA Challenge (Part 3) - #100 by G4TGJ.
Previous discussions:
I made the first Challenge QSOs today and so far I am amazed and looking forward what exciting QSOs this challenge will bring this year! 
I have noted that the triggers for the distance calculation seem bugged. When I uploaded an ADIF and entered my locators, the distance was not calculated. I had to click on edit and submit for each single QSO in the ADIF without changing anything to finally have the distance shown in my chaser log.
I also heard from other chasers, that the distance was not automatically calculated for their QSOs. Clicking on edit and submit again without changing anything triggered the distance calculation in their cases too.
Thanks for looking into this! Best 73!
Thomas DF7TR
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“They are also activator contacts” (G4TGJ)
Out of curiosity, do you think they should be both, or just one, in which case, which one?
Choices have to be made, the scoring system reflects the MTs choice.
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Both. Considering the logic
Activator 1 contacts Activator 2 at a distance of 100km.
Activator 1 receives no challenge points as an activator and neither does Activator 2. Both get chaser scores (in the challenge whether they are interested in chaser points or not).
Now, Activator 2 moves outside the activation zone (might be only by a metre or 2) and has another qso with Activator 1 (maybe on the unused band) and now Activator 1 gets the activator points. A mirror of the movements takes place so that both get Activator and Chaser points.
Ridiculous? - yes , will it happen? - probably not but ….therefore it should be both for summit to summit contacts to save the avoidance of either such contrivance or faff for activators.
My tuppence.
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Both.
In normal SOTA an S2S counts towards the activator’s 4 QSOs, adds to his chaser score and also adds to his S2S score.
If I work a chaser who is sat at home then, provided I have his location, the distance counts towards my activator challenge total. But if I work a chaser who happens to be sat on another SOTA summit, the distance doesn’t count towards my activator challenge total. This makes no sense!
Chaser and activator points have always been totally separate.
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I don’t see how the database will be able to discern your example so I will stick to the S2S situation. What you are saying, then, is a S2S is both an activators contact and a chasers contact and therefore should appear in each operators log twice, as activator and chaser, so you log it in the database twice, once as chaser and once as activator, if I have understood you correctly. I do see where you are coming from but it does seem a bit complicated.
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It is.
They do.
You log it once but the database enters it as activator, chaser and S2S QSO.
This is what already happens for S2S so why should the challenge work differently?
It used to be that you had to log S2S contacts separately as a chaser but that hasn’t been the case for some time, at least for ADIF uploads.
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If it were only to be one, then wouldnt it be best to match what the person is doing.
If they are activating then it should count for activator points since that is their primary activity.
Also, considering my own situation, I am likely to activate from primarily the same summit. It would be nice to see in the activator challnge score the total distance acheived. Lets say 1000km as an example. As it stands it would list 750km in the activator score and 250km in the chaser score since they were STS qsos.
Another absurd example is that you could have an activator not work a summit to summit as it doesnt benefit their score. I am 99.9% sure this will not happen until about December 31st when someone needs a few more points to leap up the totally non competive list 
Again, I’m not going to have much skin in the game, but just my thoughts.
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Going back to the opening post in part 1, I see no mention of this division, both activator and chaser score 1000 points on distance in the worked examples.
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Maybe I have it in error then. Having yet to enter any activations so far I’ll wait and see.
Similar issue here, as noted in one of my posts above.
My activation of G/LD-025 on new year’s day included a single 2m CW QSO. However, since the QSO was a S2S with GOHIK/P I am not credited with any activator points.
Given a choice, I would rather have the activator points, but surely the only logical answer is to awards both activator and chaser points for a S2S? Otherwise, I will just manually re-enter the QSO using the summit locator rather than SOTA reference (or indeed, log a second QSO that has locator rather than summit reference so that I force points for chase and actication).
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I tried adding the locator to one of the S2S QSOs but it just ignores it. The OP said:
S2S entries
The position of both activators is known, nothing needs to be entered other than the summit references.
So I think it is just a simple bug that @VK3ARR will fix when he wakes up.
Tried to get a CW QSO in today on GW/SW009. Called and called on 144.050 vertical polarisation, Quansheng mod, to no avail and switched to fm to qualify the summit. Been off SOTA for a while, but the Quansheng CW mod together with the 2026 challenge has sparked my interest again. I’m forming the impression that the biggest change in the interim has been that self spotting is now essential to make contacts, especially for CW VHF. I’m lucky that I have plenty of local summits to experiment and get myself up to speed again.
Probably an issue with ADIF upload. I assume that you have other reasons for creating the ADIF rather than just uploading the FLE file (POTA?)
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POTA
Import into Log4OM and then upload to LoTW.
The ADIF import correctly registers the S2S contacts and their distances, but this doesn’t seem to copy across to the challenge or the log details page.
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It seems like when submitting a log with locators, the locators are just converted to lat/lon values with no distance calculation triggered on submit.
Just curious but is there a way to look at historical spotting/activations from 2025 and then compare them later in 2026?
It would be interesting to see if the challenge encouraged more CW and SSB on 2 and 70 and if there were any trends (maybe even over the past 5 or more years?) or what kind of impact the challenge had over the year, and if activity remains or folks ditch it once the challenge is over (I hope not!).
Yes.
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Nope. The locators are sent complete to the backend API, where they are converted to lat/lon and distance is calculated at that point.
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I don’t quite understand what you mean here. Where are you seeing the distances?