Dear Simon, dear MT,
At first my sincere thanks for creating and maintaining SOTA, enabling hikers to enjoy the combination of amateur radio and mountaineering together, often with a pile-up. Equivalent for chasers.
But today is a sad and frustrating day – you want to turn the DL-Association to P150. It looks there is no agreement by the Association Manager and the Region Managers ?
Why is this necessary ? There are other P100 Associations existing. Why changing now ?
We agreed 2008 that DL is a P100 Association. Later you created the Summit Density Argument, tuned the threshold to support your decisions which area is P150 and which not. A lot was written about this on the reflector already in 2015:
DL Association is already a difficult Association in terms of points vs. effort. Have never ever seen reports like “Easy 100 points within a few days” or similar in the DL Association. Why is it necessary to make it even more difficult ?
How does this change make the world a better place ? Less summits mean less activations, less QSOs, less chaser points, overall reduced activity.
HAM Radio in Germany is shrinking, average age of the Hams increases almost one year per year, only very few youngsters. Does such action improve the attractiveness of Amateur Radio and SOTA ?
You may personally feel good about “We proudly pushed the P150 Purity to DL too”.
But shouldn’t we perform only such actions which increase attractiveness of SOTA and Amateur Radio and create additional activity instead of reducing it ?
How about older activators, some with health issues. The easier summits are the only possibility for them to participate in SOTA as activator. Deleting these summits excludes them in future. (I know there is not a 1o1 mapping of hiking difficulty with prominence, but often it is…)
Based on all the previous discussions I expect an answer like “SOTA is not a democracy and you have to live with the MT decisions otherwise stop participating and create your own program.” Well… This is the world we live in… Still I wanted to express my thoughts above…
Want to activate these 136 summits which you set for deletion. How is this possible in 15 Months ? Can you extend the transition period until 2029 ?
Thanks and BR
73 andy DL2DVE - RM of DL/MF
(PS: will take a look at the summits you deleted per Oct 1st later)