Hi all,
On 07/19/2023, @VE3OMV activated EA7/MA-008. The operation was carried out from the car. Chassers should delete the QSO.
I have already asked SOTA MT to delete the activity.
Published in Radioaficionados magazine, October 2025, page 41
73 de José
MA EA7
Hope you’ve reached out to Maria first to ask her to delete the activation? May be a good educational moment.
I didn’t knwo
I didn’t know José was a member of The Four Seasons?
Other way around Maria contacted José and ask for the activation to be deleted. This is more for the benefit of the chasers so they know to delete their chase.
Hello,
I add some more info about the article.
This activation took place back in 2023. It seems Maria is a POTA activator and, by that time, decided to try her first SOTA activation taking the chance of a holiday trip to Spain.
The summit is a drive up and when she reached the mountain top temperature was very high.
Most probably, Maria didn’t have a proper reading of SOTA rules and she finally did her activation with an improvised antenna and having her FT-450D rig in the car.
Some time later, she explains, her ham mates informed about her mistake. In her article, she adds a paragraph to explain the rules and she agrees it wasn’t a valid activation.
According to the database, she uploaded the activation but forgot to delete it afterwards, and there it is, still recorded.
She published her story in QST magazine, and now, we had it translated for the Spanish magazine.
What causes a big impact is the inclusion of these photos while operating next the car. Despite the paragraph further down explains this wasn’t a valid activation, we all know there are people who don’t read the text but watches the nice pictures.
This is not a nice publicity for SOTA, and some people could extract wrong information and maybe go afterwards to try SOTA the same way, which is not the right one.
Sure Maria had no intention to cause a mess and just wanted to share her excitement while planning the trip and her first SOTA, but , hey, we better add a note soon in the magazine to make things clear and show good examples of valid activation, which is what we, activators, do every week all over!
Let’s keep people well informed and correct the Database according to rules.
María is welcome to get back to Spain, do SOTA and enjoy nature, culture and gastronomy!
73 Ignacio
The Four Tops?
(Known within the industry as The Floor Mops…)
Yes, Four Seasons is, of course, a pizza not a Motown group 
Washed down with Sherry, or perhaps a glass of New Mexican Rosé?
Last time I had a Sherry was late December back in ‘63. Ah yes, what a special time for me… 
Alas for Vivaldi!
I was just about to point out to Andy he had the wrong band, nice one Tom! (It’s not his genre)…
73 Phil
Similar wrong information was published in the SEP/OCT 2025 edition of the ARRL On The Air magazine.
An article about adding a director and reflector to a mobile antenna (on the roof of the car, fixing them with magnets), to make it into a vertical “half-yagi” was interesting, but one sentence gave the wrong idea about SOTA
Snippet from page 22:
Luc - ON7DQ
I was distracted by the expected cost of 4 new tyres for the jalopy, I have been using the power available which is why the back tyres are down to 2mm after only 12500 miles 
Fronts not too bad at 4mm for a nominal 40/60% torque split. But Y-rated tyres appear to be made of butter.
I’m not sure Frankie Valli will be happy being called a pizza.
At least the de-railing of the thread happend again by the rules of the Reflector 
I follow several forum sites, the biggest one is the Zed. It is perfectly normal for topic drift to set in once the main topic has had a good airing. I see that as healthy, once the work is done then we can have fun, ham style rag chews often go in unexpected directions on the air, why should it be different on line?
In this case all that needed to be said had been said, letting it drift into light-heartedness helps to allay any possible embarrassment that might be felt by the young lady who made a perfectly understandable mistake.
Let the drift continue!
