Congratulations Peter! Your pictures tell an amazing story … quite the SOTAdventure!! All I could think about as I looked at the pictures of your ascent was the terrain you would have to come down!
Ray / KD8EQA
1 Like
I absolutely agree with you that the Mt. Assiniboine activation was and is brilliant! I haven’t layed out the argument correctly: I think that somebody who climbs so well and high PLUS does SOTA should earn the goat for that one alone. My argument is that for the hill hiking folks like me it´s a detrimental nudging to see 2 pointers nearby and 10 pointers that are drive in´s 200 km away. Point allocation should be simple, fair and comparable: I don’t see the point that giving 10 points to a 1050 m high hill in germany or France when a hill of similar hight in austria earns you 4.
I would be in favor of a “green goat” that honors the activation of hills around the home QTH more heavily and also favors public transport, which is quite well established in Central Europe.
That is not an attack on the well established SOTA system that exists now; I think it could be amended to fit environmental motivations with additional titles. To include such would keep the community from splitting and use the excellent tools like SOTLAS, which are wonderful.
best 73 Martin
2 Likes
What Andy’s post was trying to convey in a somewhat absurd manner is the moment you start to add in other components the complexity gets exponentially harder.
Think about how to apply whatever approach you want to take to all 180,000 summits. Then work out how a green SOTA award scheme might work for someone who takes public transport to a summit but flew across three continents to get there in the first place (guilty as charged, milord).
What we do have is the ability to add tags to summits that are accessible by public transport which can help you plan a green SOTA expedition. Coverage is not very comprehensive however.
If someone wants to start their own Most Epic Activation award, I am sure the MT wouldn’t object.
2 Likes
Comes a point where activating is about the adventure more than the points. We are all free to choose our own adventures, and set our own challenges. My choices and challenges and yours will be different. If you chose to document your adventures then the rest of us can share them if we wish. Dream up a good personal challenge, make it interesting, about something other than the points, and maybe it will pull folks in. There’ve been a few like that along the way. LA1KHA’s PP3/MN1604 Challenge comes to mind. It’s not about points, and it’s not “official” (so it didn’t require any changes to SOTA rules or the database) but it certainly captured some folks’ imaginations and ran for a while.
2 Likes