My attempt to alert was repeatedly rejected now.
“Submission failed: Unable to connect to SOTA Database”
Maybe someone wants to have a look at this issue.
73, Johannes
Also other sota services were down and now have been resuscitated by @MM0FMF Andy.
Please try again.
73 de IZ3GME Marco
Off course someone should ask Andy why they were not working… 
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In the meantime I was on the hill. Up there I selfspotted and it worked. Many thanks.
73, Johannes
A nice Challenge for the future could be to activate / chase without Spots, old school style…
Tnx for restarting the service
73 Ignacio
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Thanks. It would be much better if I hadn’t locked everything up earlier. Sorry if it hassled people being unable to spot till I spotted my error.
For my penance I have just fixed the vacuum cleaner. Took me 3hrs to take the case apart to get to the broken switch, fit a bodged alternate and reassemble. 14x T15 Torx screws and 12 plastic parts to unclip. Re-assembly took 7 attempts to get all the bits in the right place at the right time and the push and it all clicks and you tighten up the Torx screws.
I tried to order a new switch assembly online, found one that was about £15 inc P&P. And what did I find, the company is in Ireland and “no longer ships to the UK because of Brexit”.
Brexit, the gift that just never stops giving. 
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Yes, problem solved in a short while but I’m sorry for @OE3TBU which sent some sms to IT gateway just to let me discover the problem
73 de IZ3GME Marco
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@MM0FMF Is https://status.sota.org.uk/ still a reliable indicator of Summits on the Air System Status?
It shows everything at 100% for past 24 hours.
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Old school was to ask the first chaser finding you to post a spot!
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The status page basically checks the servers are running and have network connectivity. All the servers were working and responding to health probes. The issue was the transactions on the database were locked. So you could check if the DB was running and it was but you couldn’t get any queries to run. You couldn’t place an alert if SOTAwatch could not check if the summit was valid.
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Hi Marco,
I solved it the old way as well. At that time, I was doing an initial activation of OE/ST-602 in very cold winter conditions with frozen fingers. In the end, I managed it with only 4 QSOs 
.
Thanks for solving the issue 
73 de OE3TBU, Thomas
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I activated G/NP-031 yesterday. My first CQ on 30m created an RBN spot but on 20m no spots. Still had 5 replies from chasers though. It took me a while to notice that there were no RBN spots - if I had then I would have self spotted. Mobile signal was a bit poor although SMS spotting did work when I later did it for 2m.
I activated the summit from a different location than last time. I had a mobile signal of sorts whereas last time I had no signal at all so I would have been completely in the dark as to what was happening.
If there was no spotting system then chasers would find activators, assuming we used a small range of frequencies. But because chasers work off spots then they probably don’t tune around much.
It’s disappointing that none of the stations that worked me on 20m without seeing a spot didn’t then spot me.
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