I’ve just corrected my lat/long as it was a couple of miles out. Not sure why it was wrong. I’m unlikely to chase 2m SSB/CW from home but you never know.
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I just tested a few values at 3 and 3.5 decimal places in google maps until I found a pair that looked reasonable (i.e. not spot on someone else’s house, and near enough to mine). QRZ also updated to use the same numbers.
My previous two-decimal-places position wasn’t quite that far out (and within the same six-character grid square), but definitely far enough out for me to need to zoom out a bit to find my place…
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I think in some cases it is impossible to really know until something like this sort of challenge happens.
I worked M1DYU from billinge yesterday. The interesting thing is that he is literraly in the same 6 figure grid square as the summit, IO83PM, so I was wondering what kind of score it would generate. The answer (for my score) was 2km . Looking at the mapped qsos it also showed him in exactly the place I expected which suggested that his home location has been correctly input. So for the majority of the time , it would appear to anyone looking at the qso maps to be correct.
It was only the chaser challenge scores that had gone out of kilter. As a silly excersise I looked to see what ancient measurement it could have been converted to which would give the right answer. A “Span” (9 inches) is the closest I could come up with although a “Shaftment” is also pretty close.
One for the DB admins, is it easier for you guys to just correct these as they happen or have some kind of procedure that checks and flags up say scores over a certain amount for a qso (say 2000km). It probably the manual approach for now as that should be a decreasing workload over time, but in case of other similar challenges its worth making a note of.
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Good to work you. First time for me using 2m SSB 
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Part of the challenge was to give some of these GIS type features are good going over. People’s locations are stored in their SSO (the sign on account) database. A first programmatic fix is to run through all the accounts and find
- not in decimal degrees
- invalid characters
- latitude > +/-90 (indicates probably needs swapping with longitude)
All of those checks give absolute fixes. The harder fix is people who have swapped lat&long but the values are in range. e.g. mine is 55.9,-3.5 swapping it to -3.5, 55.9 gives a valid location, somewhere near The Seychelles. So to spot it as wrong involves converting the home association to a geographic extent and then checking the lat&long are inside that extent. I’m sure Andrew VK3ARR said there was something to aide with this but I can’t find where he said it now.
But… this is a “How do you eat an Elephant” kind of problem. You take lots and lots of small mouthfuls over some time rather than trying to swallow it in one go. And we have till Jan 1st 2027 (should Putin/Trump allow the world to continue that long) to fix it!
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Two decimal places is already more precise than a 6-digit locator which, at the same latitudes, is roughly 4.6 km (2.9 miles) N/S by 3.6 km (2.2 miles) E/W.
I notice 3 decimal places gets you almost on my house and 2 decimal places is in the nearby estuary. Better the latter so any bomb goes in the drink.
Probably easier to give your 6-digit locator rather than two decimal numbers (one of which could be negative, as with my QTH) especially in Morse.
Andy
[IO84of]
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Over the air I would give my locator. I was referring to how accurate my position as a chaser would be when it came to the DB calculating my chaser challenge distance.
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Wishful thinking?
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23 SOTA summits so not a bad plan. Except there may not be so many summits in a few years time.
I’ve been wondering what ways there are for entering locations for QSO end-points into the database. So far, I figure:
-
An Activator’s location is determined automatically from their summit reference, so a Chaser (including another Activator working summit-to-summit) does not need to get a specific location from an Activator. The summit reference is all that’s needed.
-
A Chaser’s own location defaults to their lat/long location as entered in their SSO profile. If a Chaser is at their default location they don’t need to do anything more to get the location of their end of a QSO into the database. If, however, they’re chasing from some other location then (as far as I can tell) they need to upload an ADIF with either MY_GRIDSQUARE or MY_LAT and MY_LON set appropriately.
-
An Activator needs to get a location from each chaser, and can put that into the database using one of:
a) A %QRA%ZZ99ZA% type comment in the V2 .csv
b) Via ADIF location fields, either “GRIDSQUARE” or “LAT” and “LON”
c) Enter each location contact by contact via the website.
What have I missed/got wrong?
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I dumped the entire SSO database with User ID, Lat and Lon figures then went through them for a bit of a sanity check. We now do input validation since the software began supporting it, so none of these would be accepted now, but it’s interesting to see just how much variation can exist even on something simple as Latitude and Longitude. I’ve not included the ones where they’ve just specified a city name (twice), or the weirder one where the email address has been copied to both fields. The last one is a longitude, but I don’t know if it’s 11 or 111 degrees. For privacy, only one of the coordinates is copied here.
75*29'42.338"W
46-40-57-O
-97.34509 degrees east
67-04-05.53w
-6.313333 (6° 18' 47'' S)
135° 45' 11'' E
42 deg 27 min. N
53.4084° N
46°392927
511440N
N42.2533
6° 53′ O
N50° 46' 34.6"
68 Deg 0 Min 36 Sec West
7 degre 45 min 36 sec south
111444
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1977… One of my first computer lessons. Teacher said - GIGO Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Validation is everything. Of course when the database started these fields were merely comments and had no bearing on anything, so it is unsurprising that they allowed anything to be entered and stored.
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Just out of interest why have the activated and chased scores got different values for a S2S? I had a S2S with @G4TGJ on Saturday and note that it has been allocated a distance of 72km for one and 71km for t’other. The hills were G/TW-001 and G/NP-031.
One rounds up on display and the other truncates (on display only)
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Ahhh! Thank you 
As a side note I have no interest in submitting logs for this challenge, but will give away points from time to time (when I have the energy to lug the FT857 up the hill). I don’t say this as a criticism of the challenge; but rather as a complement to the designers of the SOTA database. It is so easy to use, that it acts as no barrier to participation. Thank you and well done to those involved!
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I have just entered mine. Looks like I didn’t set it up when I first started SOTA.
How many other users do not have a default location?
About 20,000.
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