As usual, a lot of time was devoted by several people this month to the SOTA summits data.
The visible part of the iceberg is the new VE3 - Canada - Ontario Association starting on April 1st, with 1.000 new SOTA references you can already discover on the SOTA Mapping Project .
For the invisible part, I would like to give special thanks to all people who contribute to the continuous improvement of the summits data, and in particular the SOTA Associations Managers.
The number of SOTA references keeps increasing fast. A side effect is that the number of border summits increases also, which can lead to difficult decisions between the Association Managers to decide which country will “own” these summits references. During the last months, several such cases have been resolved sensibly thanks to the efforts and understanding of the Association Managers concerned.
Also, several hundreds of improvements have been made to the SOTA data, from positions and elevations to summits names and duplicate removals.
Please keep sending your suggestions for improvement to the relevant Association Managers (in particular about local summits names or apparent insufficient prominence), so that we keep improving things all together one step at a time.
This is great news. Many thanks to the people who have worked to make this happen.
I lived in North Bay, ON for several years, and had a Cessna 172 floatplane, so I am familiar with the area around that city. I was able to fly/hike to the summit of Ishpatina Ridge (VE3/NE-001), and later made a 5-day canoe trip to the summit of Maple Mountain (VE3/NE-011). Regretably without amateur radio equipment.
I can hardly wait to search the database and plan a trip or two.
Super excited to hear about the new VE3 Association! I just obtained my Canadian call sign last Friday, VA3RRK, while in Toronto…my YL is Canadian and we spend time there regularly so I thought it would make sense to get a VE call, and now I can’t wait to go back to activate some VE summits!
Thanks to all of you who work to make SOTA such an awesome part of our great hobby.
For anyone interested in VE3 SOTA … we have created a VE3 SOTA discussion group on Groups.IO.
This is intended for discussions related to VE3 SOTA that may not be of interest to a wider
SOTA audience. The group is called (not surprisingly) VE3SOTA and can be found here :
Very cool! There are plenty of hams in Ontario, so hopefully we grab some new activators to bring into the fold.
The MT might consider making a post on some popular forums to bring attention to it, like qrz and eham? A little promotion might help people who would otherwise have no idea that this opportunity has popped up for them? Just an idea. Thanks to those who did all the hard work!
As there has been a small disturbance in The Force making it hard for some people to visit sotamaps.org (it is being worked on, give it time) here is an over view of the VE3 summits.
I managed to upload the VE3 summits with no bonus period. It doesn’t affect anything at all as VE3 started the day after its bonus finished. I’ll get them fixed ASAP.
I’d just like to add my welcome to Bill and his team into SOTA and a big hello to all the VE3 ops coming on board!
I hope you all enjoy it, and that the planned activations for 8th April go well.
That the analysis of VE3 went pretty smoothly is down to the Provincial Mapping Unit, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources & Forestry.
Our baseline data source for Canada is the Canadian Digital Elevation Model, but for VE3 they have their own model in addition, plus their own topo map, plus a massive (!) file of spot heights, plus (!) a big list of geographic names. If all administrations were this well organized and this open with their geographic data Summits Team would be very happy.
We’ve still got lots to do on Canada. Updates to VE2 are in progress. VE4 is being looked at. VE5 could do with some candidates to help us out.
Amongst the database carnage I’ve been upto tonight I have, I think, fixed the missing bonus points for VE3. I’m not sure what happened but it will have been something I did which I shouldn’t have done or something I didn’t do. Whatever it was I should or shouldn’t have done, I have now done the opposite which has restored the Yin/Yang balance and the bonus points have appeared.
