Here’s a count of the number points, bonus points earned and number of activations by association for the last year, Chistmas Day 2024 to Christmas Day 2025
Interesting stats. I activated two one-point summits in Western Australia this year. Activations-wise that’s a surprisingly high proportion of the total number of activations in the association. Had I realised there were so few activations I might well have tried to fit a few more in. More research next time…
I’ve been looking for where the end of year reports are saved since I moved from a Windows to Linux main PC. They are somewhere, just not sure where. Also there are a whole host of database house keeping jobs to do, things like a few hundred chase QSOs logs with no chaser callsign and 6500 orphaned QSOs (i.e. no account owns them). One of those issues was caused by a bug now fixed. The others mainly caused by my fat-fingers and the lack of a table constraint in the DB schema.
So whilst playing with SQL procedures to clean up and fix these problems I’m playing with other code such as the association activation counts.
Then there’s this…top 10 chasers by regions chased in 2025
chaser
chased_regions
F4WBN
699
EA7GV
477
S57S
471
OK2PDT
429
F5PYI
381
SM5LNE
374
KF9D
372
DL8DXL
361
SQ9JYK
354
OK1KT
351
And the same for top 10 chasers by associations chased in 2025
So these 20 summits are the “most uniquely activated summits”. By that highest ratio of number of unique activators / total number of activations. Some are “destination summits” where activators have made a specific effort to reach them, 4 of the first 5 are on islands, not on any major continental land mass.
I need to work on how to present it better but there were 1309 distinct callsigns who did activations for which they got zero points. But that includes fails as well as repeats.
Also in your case you appear twice as there are two calls the same but distinct!
Count
OwnCallsign
8
VK1AD
17
VK1AD/P
I was surprised by how many there were with 1309 examples. But again I am amazed there were 140 activations in Alaska !
I guess you’re confusing Kapellenberg with some other summit in BW, the number starting with 8xx. Kapellenberg is so boring, no one in their right mind would bother to go there twice
I was actually the only one who went there once in winter and once in summer (and most likely won’t go there again).
There must surely be summits which top these with a score of 100. For example any summit which has been activated precisely once would be “more uniquely activated” than any on this list. What am I missing? Have you simply excluded this edge case?
A very good point Martyn. It’s what I like about SOTA, you produce something and look at your fine handywork, publish it and someone else then notices and says “Hey there’s nothing constraining the Marzal Vanes so there’ll be side-fumbling” (c.f. TurboEncabulator for origins of Marzal Vanes)
Now this code is amongst the various end-of-year stats and it looks like I’ve modified it from something Gary G0HZQ wrote when he produced the initial database design. I had to stop and study the code because there should be lots of summits activated 1 time by 1 activator which will give a higher UniqueActivatorScore.
So yes, the code removes summits which have only been activated only once by each distinct activator. So if I activated Bills Butte (if it existed it would be in Montana!) and that was the only activation then the UniqueActivatorScore would be 100 in the case. If Martyn activated Bill’s Butte as well, it would have 2 distinct activators and 2 activators so would still score 100.
The piece of code decided those summits were “uninteresting”, more interesting is summits that have an almost 100 Uniqueness score that is most activations have been by different activators who activated it once. But at least 1 activator went back for a second activation. Are they more interesting that then others? You tell me.
There are 12550 summits which have UnqiueActivatorScore of 100 and neither me or Gary could figure out how to rank them to give a top 20! So the summits listed have a UniqueActivatorScore of < 100.
So here are the top 20 summits with the most distinct activators. It’s heavily biased to the UK because those associations have been running longest. I see Gehrenberg DM/BW-348 sneaks in. That’s the summit by Friedrichshafen so tends to get activated a lot at the end of June.
Ham radio is also very popular in the UK. With around 75,000 operators compared to about 13,000 in France (for roughly the same total population), the difference is significant. Combined with the fact that many summits are extremely easy to access, when not drive up summits, it’s not surprising to see these big numbers.
And that most of the summits are within an hour and half drive of two major cities (Manchester and Liverpool) and the WB ones close to Birmingham.
The three with over 1000 activations can be done as a threesome in not much time at all and due to being near a large city are realtively easy to activate with just a 2m FM handie (Gun can be the tough one). None are technically a drive on, but Gun is a very short (50m) walk to the activation zone and Shining Tor has the longest walk in at about 20 minutes but fairly easy.
Proof by contradiction: Suppose there was a set of summits that were not interesting. The member of that set with the lowest height would be “The smallest uninteresting summit” immediately making it interesting. QED
(c.f. TurboEncabulator for origins of Marzal Vanes)