I’ll start with news of EA5, South-East Spain. Here we have nearly 400 brand-new summits, plus a few more replacements for old summits. For the moved summits the move is happening straight away, so do please check you’re activating the new position and not the old one. Remember that if we moved it it’s because the old position in not in the new AZ.
Retirements:
EA5/AB-001
EA5/AB-002
EA5/AB-013
EA5/AT-021
EA5/AT-032
EA5/MU-006
EA5/MU-012
EA5/MU-023
EA5/MU-026
EA5/MU-028
EA5/MU-030
EA5/VL-001
EA5/VL-003
New summits
EA5/AB-016 to EA5/AB-100
EA5/AT-041 to EA5/AT-105
EA5/CS-021 to EA5/CS-071
EA5/MU-042 to EA5/MU-164
EA5/VL-017 to EA5/VL-103
EA5/MU-026 has been reinstated at its correct position
All summits have been aligned to the MDT05 LIDAR high point, except for a few cases where extensive checking with the LIDAR point cloud data (sub-metre horizontal resolution) has found a higher point.
Please note that the elevations are straight from the data. Spanish Vertice (trig point) elevations, as listed on the maps, refer to the vertice itself, regardless of whatever it’s stood on. So there are plenty of examples where this is several metres above the land surface.
We’ll have the updated ARM very soon.
We’ve got a handful of E7 edits coming in today, removing stray summits from 9A and YU! The moved summits are E7/BO-001 “Maglić”, E7/BO-011 “Šćit” and E7/BO-041 “Kolunsko brdo”.
This turned up a summit missing from 9A, so we are adding 9A/GH-213 “Hum”.
I know there’s a lot more to do in E7 and this is only just a start.
Also ready for August 1 is an update for the ZS association. The ZS association has an interesting history, being one of the first non-UK associations. As a consequence, it lacked the computerised checking now done for new associations. This means there were a lot of summits missed and a lot of summits that did not qualify under SOTA rules. Anyone who had tried to activate in ZS is well aware of the issues with summit locations.
The sheer amount of effort required to bring the association up to date has meant that submissions have been unfortunately incomplete over the years, but thanks to a new concerted effort by a bunch of ZS hams, an update is possible. In particular, I will say thanks to Brian ZS6BV who submitted an update for Limpopo region; combined with checking from Warren ZL2AJ and myself, we can update 4 regions: Limpopo, Gauteng, North West and Free State provinces.
In total, 82 summits have been removed as not qualifying for SOTA - these are active until the end of this month. To offset this loss, we add 819 summits, active from today, which should be more than fair compensation.
Updates to the other regions are planned later in the year; almost 3000 summits are slated for addition.
The updates for E7/9A/YU will be done this evening (1-aug-2017). I ran out of time&willpower last night after fighting with the installation process of a whole ruck of new development tools that we’ll be using to update the DB app.