Association updates 31st January 2021

Associations
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Here are the latest updates to the SOTA lists…

JW – Svalbard

Our new most northerly association is Svalbard. It looks to be an amazing place, with 1422 summits. As well as the main island of Spitsbergen (which we had to divide into four regions, because there are so many summits) there are many outlying islands.

Welcome to our AM, Sander, JW4PUA.

The summits will appear on the region pages once they become valid (1st February).

Here’s a preview:

JW ARM Map 150
JW ARM Map 1501240×1753 207 KB

Base map © Norwegian Polar Institute, CC BY 4.0 licence.

VE7 Update

Another big association is VE7. The issue that has prompted this month’s update is that it is so big, with thousands upon thousands of summits yet to be added (although mostly in the north, it has to be said). We’re not actually adding those summits this month, but to accommodate them in the future we’ve had to divide up regions. Rather than have a confusing set of old and new overlying regions we’ve reallocated references to some of the existing summits. We will post further information to resolve the changes, if you’re wondering about any of your old activations / chases and how they relate to the new codes.

Another big change is the points banding. Originally the 10-point band was set so high (4000m) that only a handful of VE7 summits qualified. We’ve now dropped this to 2600m whilst keeping the 2-point level at 500m and squishing everything else in between. This will see a big boost to VE7 scoring. I think it looks a lot fairer now.

SP Update

AM Bart, SQ9APD, has provided many position tweaks and name corrections for Poland. Three references have been retired, with three new entries.

Retired refs: SP/BS-021, SP/BZ-042, SP/SS-015

New refs:

  • SP/BP-009, Wilcze
  • SP/BS-036, Jaworzynka
  • SP/BZ-084, Kotliny (Błyszcz)

We have two changes to scoring resulting from elevation revisions:

  • SP/BZ-060, 4pt ⇒ 6pt
  • SP/SS-018, 2pt ⇒ 1pt

EA1 Update

A handful of small corrections, but we had to retire EA1/AT-291. This turned out to be almost indistinguishable in elevation from a near neighbour, and only one of them was the truly prominent summit.

LA Update

Just one summit retired – LA/RL-057. Again this was a case of almost indistinguishable neighbours (LA/RL-276). The difference in about half a metre according to mapping agency trig point annotations.

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There are Winter Bonus changes in some W6 regions. New RM for W6/ND

Look out for summit name changes in YBJ

As Simon says, there are big changes in VE7. We’re working on a process to handle this whilst also actually doing the changes. As such the changes may not be complete for 1-Feb-2021. There is enough data to move that rather than manually move a few summits between regions with me typing in the odd reference, we want to produce a programmatic solution such that it is useful should we ever need to reorganise regions in the future.

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Looks exciting. We considered going to Svalbard one winter to look for northern lights, which we don’t see in the Southeastern US. I read up on the area before deciding that the weather would be more reliable elsewhere. Is Svalbard the only association where an activator is required to carry protection, with firearms recommended, against polar bears, or are there others?

Note that hunting polar bears in Svalbard is not permitted, and shooting is only for self-defense in extreme situations. Interesting recent account here showing that this is not taken lightly.

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I was watching a video with an interview of a seamstress there. It sounds like a large part of her work is stitching back together the tents that were shredded by the polar bears – hopefully unoccupied at the time!

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ISTR that Svalbard is the most Northerly place you can reach as a tourist. If you want to go further North on land you need to do so as part of a job (government / military / research etc.)

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Hi Andy

Poked around in a few of the usual places https://w6-sota.org/, https://summits.sota.org.uk/association/W6 but didn’t see anything covering W6 changes. What changed?

Paul

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Some of the regions had the bonus extended to March 31st from March 15th. I don’t have access to list on this PC at present.

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ND-397 is now ND-400. Here are the other changes:

W6/NS-038:

We need to make NS-038 active again. It appears to have been made inactive by mistake, in an earlier update (by way of setting an earlier “valid to” date).

W6/NS-038 - it’s a P1K summit and should totally qualify

per USGS:

{“USGS_Elevation_Point_Query_Service”:{“Elevation_Query”:{“x”:-119.615,“y”:38.2332,“Data_Source”:“3DEP 1/3 arc-second”,“Elevation”:3297.02,“Units”:“Meters”}}}

W6/CT-147:

The name of this summit is “North Lower Lytle Creek Ridge.” Right now it says “North Lower Lyte Creek Ridge.”

W6/SC-422:

Set points of W6/SC-422 to 2. It appears to have been stuck in the wrong point band by mistake, in an earlier update.

Southern Coastal (SC) RM:

Change to Adam K6ARK - email tradmonkey@gmail.com

Winter Bonus:

Change from: - 1 December to 15 March inclusive

Change to: 1 December to 31 March inclusive.

Regions: CN, NE, NW, SN, NS, SS, WH, IN and CT.

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The updated ARM is actually on the system, it’s just that we’re fighting to get the version number displayed correctly. Download the one with the later date and you will see version 3.3 with these in Rex’s change log.

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Hi Elliott

Thanks and great to see Adam K as a part of the RM team.

Paul