(ALL BELOW ARE MY THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS ONLY - everyone is free to have a different position, but please read and think it over).
How about a general agreement, that ALL CHALLENGES should be organised by groups of SOTA enthusiasts, taking the work off the MT? In this way more involvement and commitment between SOTAists is built rather than just “demands” on the MT.
My personal feelings about the subject of a challenge for 2025:
I prefer a shorter challenge - not a full year (I understand the wish to give Northern and Southern Hemisphere equal radio conditions but as results are normally (I think) looked at on an association basis - this is less important).
I would prefer a break and the next challenge to be in 2026.
I have no objection to 15m - perhaps combined with 80m - I find the dual-band challenges more interesting.
As I say above, the challenge to be organised not by the MT rather by interested groups within the SOTA community.
MAY I WISH A HAPPY & HEALTHLY NEW YEAR to everyone.
[quote=“M1BUU, post:42, topic:37023”]
Haven’t really worked out the possibilities of getting there yet.
Hi Colin
Here is one idea:
If you can get to Stansted airport (Near Cambridge - not really London despite what they say) you can fly to Memmingen via Ryanair fairly cheaply . Memmingen is 50 miles from Frierichshafen. You could hire a car, again quite cheap through the various agencies that offer multiple deals, and do some SOTAs enroute to the show. Just one idea if you go to Germany, a country I enjoy visiting at every opportunity for easy to access SOTA summits, the people, the culture / architecture and the food and drink.
73 and Happy New Year
Phil G4OBK
PS I’m glad there is no Challenge for 2025. Chasing SOTA in 2024 and especially 10m operation was tieing me down too much around the home and I lost interest in the 10m activating challenge in the summer as I would have needed to spend many hours sitting out on summits to find new QSO partners. If I do an activation after an hours operation maximum I have had enough.
Yes to some extent. The difference is the numbers involved.
If there was no challenge running and you or I spotted on XXm then some chasers will make an effort to chase us. That’s the cool part of SOTA. But if there is a challenge running, then there will be more activators and with the spread of associations around the world, an almost 24hr round the world group of activators. Suddenly chasing XXm becomes more worthwhile, not just the challenge itself but the chance to work stations you may not normally work. So the challenges add a critical mass of stations making it more likely as an activator that you will be chased on or have an S2S on XXm.
Perhaps selfishly for my own desires and wants, I wanted there to be almost guaranteed 10m SOTA activity at this point in the solar cycle. So I proposed a 10m challenge which my colleagues thought was good and it looks like lots of people all over the world thought it was good idea. The result was lots of 10m activity for me and lots of people having fun on 10m SOTA. That looks like a win-win to me
Whilst the sun is prepared to play along, I’d like more of the same on 10m but also on 15m. Hence the suggestion of a 15m challenge. But I had forgotten we (MT) had decided we should have a break between challenges. So there will not be an official 15m challenge but I intend to do more 15m, you’ve said you want to do more 15m and so does older Andrew VK1AD/DA (VK1AD is Andrew and VK1DA is Andrew and I always forget which is which but one is older than me!) That’s 3 of us who can compare notes.
All that waffle means that challenges help increase the number of QSOs on bands / modes less common.
That is just an informal agreement which is not bound by the General Rules, it could be abandoned or confirmed by a brief dialogue on MT channels. As I see it, we either do it now while the sunspot numbers are high or wait a decade and do it in 2035, when likely some of us will no longer be here.
Adding my 2p, as my experience of this challenge seems a bit different from the majority posting.
Firstly: It has been really good to see the effect of the 10m challenge as reflected on the Reflector. So many people trying something ‘new’ - building new antennas, working out new strategies to make 10m effective. I shared some of this: at the end of 2024, I now have a 10m vertical portable antenna languishing in a drawer, and a 10m vertical on the gable-end of the house which gets daily ‘use’ (so a 50% success rate there!)
As an activator, the ‘challenge’ approach was probably never going to fit in with my personal activation pattern. Mainly on for multi-summit, multi day trips - with a sub-1hr window of time realistic on each summit: the desire to try and make rare 10m contacts was soon overwhelmed by the desire to make any contacts and get on to the next peak. I had hoped that the challenge might inspire me to spend more time on fewer peaks, but I found I slipped quickly back into my old habits.
As a chaser, I had far higher hopes. I can honestly say that I have listened for every 10m SSB activation that has been spotted a times I was by the radio. But have to admit near complete failure:
NA seems to come in reasonably regularly in ZL4, an I can listen to endless pileups of (mainly POTA operators) handing out 5/9 reports. But I believe that I have managed only 1 successful (POTA) chase in the year on 10m! The openings to a specific station seemed to fade before the pileup eased enough for a weak DX like me to get through.
Never heard a single EU activation.
VK has been almost entirely silent at my QTH, despite the huge number of 10m activations. Guess the distance is just wrong? But then I read reports of intra-VK 10m contacts - so surely VK-ZL should work. Any VKs able to report on success/failure of 10m for VK-ZL contacts?
I suspect that a good directional antenna might have made things very different - but for reasons of covenants and neighbourly goodwill, it’s not a road I’m willing/able to go down at our QTH.
So mainly my experience of the challenge was frustration. I missed a lot of S2S that I would normally have got, waiting for operators to drop from 10m to lower band where I would normally have worked them. My DX chases felt well down on normal - again spending time waiting for 10m-challenge operators to give another band a go.
My thoughts then:
A break between challenges would be a great thing to allow things to get back to ‘normal’, at least for a year.
I’d absolutely be in favour of another challenge in a year or two. To shake things up, get us all trying something different - and hey, maybe the next one will work out for me. And even if it doesn’t, it will be fun trying.
In VK we have been really amazed at the lack of signals from ZL this year. Quite often we have seen the space weather services charts showing red all over not just VK apparently locked out of the usual ionospheric services but ZL and the space between us also red, meaning no access to F layer due to usually an intensely ionised D layer.
Usually we note your spots for 40m and prepare to work you on 20m. This year, in general, that hasn’t worked, we haven’t heard you on either band. And no 10m either but we know you run a tight ship on your activations so once you have qualified, you are at risk of imminent shutdown.
Occasionally a signal on 15m has been workable. I think I worked about 2 or 3 ZL on 10m in the year, or that’s my impression anyway. I was not active for the first 6 months of the year so my results reflect that. Half the year, half the summits and half the unique contacts, so a quarter of the final score.
I admit that am the older of the several vk1 Andrews with similar looking callsigns, we met at FN in 2016. Confusingly you probably also met the other Andrew (VK1AD) at FN a few years later. This was a plot to keep up the confusion level.
I remember a pleasant lunch with German beer and a good talk about lots of topics with you maybe in 2015. And yes I met the other Andrew just the other year. Well it seems like recently but it may be a few years back. COVID has wiped out a huge chunk of time for me. It was March 2020 and then pazoow, it was 2024. And for no reason I understand I remembered Andrew’s old VK1NAM call out of nowhere and that he is VK1AD. Odd stuff the mind, well mine is.
Has D layer ionisation been worse this peak than the last few peaks?
Yes, the lunch, the beer and the chat while walking around a few huge buildings stuffed with radio gear, mostly used, all good memories. It was 2016.
I think the lockout effect has been more intense this year than I recall on hf. It may have been similar in earlier peaks but I was less active and had fewer bands available to me in 68/69 and in the early 80s. There was nothing like a kX3 available then though. Going portable has never been as easy and effective as it is this decade. Lower power requirements and lightweight gear has revolutionised amateur radio.
