Challenges are scored outside of normal scoring and the two are independent of each other. In the activator case this means you go and do your SOTA thing on a summit and enter your logs. Chasers just enter their QSOs.
The normal SOTA scoring rules are applied to that log and your activations, chases, uniques, S2S, completes and whatever scores are updated.
Then the challenge rules are applied to your logged data… if it’s 70cms week and you have logged 70cms QSOs for that time period then those QSOs are scored according to the challenge rules. There will be a separate page to show challenge results.
So a single 70cms activator QSO will count for the challenge during 70cms week even though you would not get activation points, bonus points etc. for a single QSO.
There are a whole lot of things in that list that I don’t do, or to be more correct, that I haven’t done so far in my SOTA career. If I regularly did all the things listed here in this Challenge, it wouldn’t be a Challenge, would it!
Thanks to the MT for coming up with this. It’s going to be interesting (and challenging) figuring out how I’m going to have a go at it.
Good luck with it everyone, and I look forward to meeting some of you on-air participating in the Challenge.
I’ll pass on this one. With only one weekend possible each month I would likely never be on a summit for most of these anyway. One month for each would have been better.
There are also to many digital days versus real Ham Radio mode days. Button pushing is not my idea of the essence of Ham radio…talking to people is. If I can’t hear it, and decode it in my head, and then encode it with my voice or my key what is the point?
I actually like to talk to people, to hear a voice, to hear a fist, to acoustically exchange some info…your name, the weather, what are u running over there, how the heck are you Chuck? I would miss hearing those great accents we can’t hear on digital. I would miss the Humanity.
And yes, I know I am a Dinosaur…but I am OK with that.
Thanks for your thoughts Pete. Note that Digital Voice modes are not “button pushing” - you hear the other op’s voice better than you do with SSB!
The datamodes therefore only account for 25% - much more than presently exists in SOTA, but much less than presently exists in all amateur radio.
The scoring is designed so that if you don’t participate in the aspects that don’t interest you, then you would not be too disadvantaged overall.
The reason for only seven days each month is because we feel it is important that the majority of days in the year see a “normal” pattern of SOTA activity, rather than biased towards the Challenge flavours.
But the fact that it is seven days - one of each day of the week - means that most people wouldn’t be disadvantaged due to their work pattern or personal circumstances.
Obviously you can’t please all the people all the time, but MT have taken on board feedback from previously Challenges and tried to address issues raised.
Yes…I have learned that also as the W7A manager…no way to please everyone…so u just have to draw a line and be done with it at some point.
I guess I liked the year long activity like the 12M challenge…every activation was like a contest…I worked over 30 europe stations from a summit one day…a number of them s2s…it was crazy fun!
This will be much lower key I think…
Tnx for clarifying the Digital Voice …my ignorance of anything digital is showing…still stuck in the 60’s here (and I knida like it Hi Hi)
Yes I too liked the year long continuous focus of 12m, but that was no good for people who didn’t like / didn’t have 12m. The same as a year long Data focus would be no good for you.
My MT colleagues successfully argued that point and I conceded that a variety of different things, and just 7 days per month, was better overall, for the reasons stated.
I can appreciate that Pete. I work at the sharp end of the semiconductor system world, working in simulating multi-billion transistor chips. I have farms of computers to play with at work. For me digital modes are both interesting and boring at the same time. It’s a bit too much like work! But the technology, the maths behind data encoding and modulation schemes that lets WSJT and FT8 etc. work is awesome. It’s not as much fun to do as when I’m in the loop trying to understand a faint morse signal.
However, a challenge is something to get you to try something you wouldn’t normally do. I’ll have a bash at them, just because! What has more me more interested is the LF stuff as I’ve never really played on those bands. I’ve been reading one of the guides Spiderbeam do showing how to make contest-grade antennas for 160m. I don’t fancy carrying and erecting an 18m pole for a 160m vertical however. The good thing about a challenge is you know there should be other people about trying to do the same so the chances of a QSO are increased.
The same for digital voice modes. Many people now have HTs etc. with a DV mode and they may use them regularly but there are not so many DV QSOs on SOTA. Typically they are used through repeaters/gateways etc. so it will be interesting to see how well they work for simplex working especially at longer range/weaker signals.
I have a feeling that only being able to do the challenge the first seven days of the month will prevent me from doing some months. For example, the first week of January I’ll still be on vacation with family, so limited time to activate. (Plus it’ll be in cold New Hampshire, and living in California has made me less excited to go out in the cold, but that’s a separate issue)
Why not let people choose a few summits each month for the challenge, and they can activate them whenever they’re able to? Is there some advantage to forcing everyone to use the same days? It seems to me that limiting the number of summits you can use each month for the challenge will make it easier for more people to participate, and won’t skew the normal operating patterns any more than jamming it all into the first week will. Plus, if I can choose the date I can pick more interesting days, e.g. I could do VHF during a VHF contest so I know there’ll be people on to work.
Hi Tom
I have tried many times to follow you when you’ve said you’re on FT8 , and I go to the band you put but can never find you. So do you go to a different frequency that wsjtx gives me for example 7.07400 ?
Anyways a good idea of yours…best 73 de M7AGB
No I’m always on the standard frequency - which is the one I self-spot. In the comments line on my spot it will also tell you the exact frequency within the FT8 window, and whether I am TXing even or odd.
I’ve looked for Tom on FT8 on several occasions from home, and not been able to copy him (though you can see him working the choice DX!) Just down to the prevailing propagation conditions…
