I usually look at who chased me for a summit just because it’s nice to know if at least 4 reported, to really verify the peak. But today I noticed that 4 chasers appeared that I had no log entries for. Could this be a database issue? Has this ever happened to any of you?
– Addition –
It happened again today, even after I was trying to be explicit. And there were no pile-ups. Three of the five chasers that have reported so far never made contact with me. One of them was recently celebrated here on the reflector for having so many chaser points.
In the grand scheme of things it is not a big deal, but it’s disappointing.
It could be that they “thought” you were calling them but you may have been answering somebody with a similar call sign & they got it mixed up. It’s quite common especially on cw. It’s happened to me both as a chaser & as an activator. You could email them to correct their log but I wouldn’t sweat the small stuff. As long as you’ve got your 4 contacts in your log that’s all that matters.
There could be another unfortunate scenerio involving dishonest chasers but let’s not go down that road .
it would help if activators gave their call sign every so often. a few days ago there were stations at 14.059, 0615, 0612, and 063. i had to listen for over 15 min before i finally got a call sign from an activator. I do like to log the correct call.
Well when you hear them send your call and your report just send CALL? bk wait for them to send their call then send <SOMECALL> de KC5BG UR 559 559 bk ? Works for me.
I have learned a lesson in all this. From now on I plan to repeat back the call sign before the signal report so it is explicit who I am replying to. And I’ll end the contact with my call sign.
Yes, and probably for mainly the reason Rick ZL3RIK gave. But then some might be due to the occasional impatient chaser who gate-crashes my current QSO with another station. The gate-crashing station often sends just a one-liner, e.g.
G8CPZ/P de {callsign} gm ur rst 559 559 tks 73 de {callsign}
… presumably in the hope I’ll log him++ even though I never sent his callsign or his report.
In this case, I make a point of waiting til he’s done, resume the interrupted QSO and explicitly use the callsign of the original station. I hope this makes it clear to anyone listening that I have totally ignored a selfish operator.
++I use he/his because I’ve not had a female op behave this way.
Yes, that would be annoying. I’ve had the opposite problem. Even when handling a pile-up I send my callsign every 3 or 4 QSOs. As the QSOs are back-to-back and very contest like, a chaser has only a minute or two at most to wait until they hear my callsign. So, I wonder why someone sends “?” so quickly after I last sent it. I can assume only that they don’t follow one of the golden rules for radio amateurs about listening on the frequency for a while before transmitting.
There is of course the opposite scenario… to be called and worked when you are activating and then 20 minutes later to be called by the same person. Personally I work them a second time and log both contacts… as they say, “for the avoidance of doubt”.
I would say that SOTA chasers are usually well behaved, especially relative to those involved in another scheme where I regularly hear phantom QSOs. Quality control issue?
It’s happened to me a few times, only in CW. In a few cases the same callsign showed up on numerous summits and I’d never had a QSO with this op. I’d like to think the best of people; simple mistake of hearing me reply to someone else and thinking it was intended for him/her. After a couple of times with this particular callsign, I started to think otherwise.
On almost every activation, I have one or two times when I hear an operator “contacting” me, even though I have clearly sent a different call, and am actually working that operator at the moment.
It seems that some chasers are so eager to get the contact, that they ignore reality. They go through the motions of a contact, even though I have not called them.
I think part of the problem is that some chasers have a high noise floor, so they try to make the contact without really being able to hear clearly. Often their timing is off, so it’s obvious they can’t copy well.
The chasers who do this aren’t aware of much. When I call “QRZ?” and attempt to give them an actual contact, they rarely come back - they just can’t hear.
A few of the smart ones call me again and have an actual QSO after a few minutes, which is the right answer.
We just have to ignore these QSO’s that didn’t happen and move along. They certainly are common on CW.
When I hear an activator and give my call I wait for some of the other stations to stop sending their calls, some 3 times. And then to be sure he is working me I give my call his report and then my call at the end. That seems to work for me and then when I check the log later if I put a (?) in the log to make sure I was in his log. That is only when the signals are very low or the noise level is high. If I come back later and his signal has improved immensely I will call again, even on the same frequency, to tell him his signal has improved at my end and make sure I am in his log, hoping he sees the band changing. And I will work him on different bands letting him know he is getting to my location. If this is bad practice no one has ever said anything. After all it is just ham radio, fun and a hobby. CW4EVER de JohnPaul//AB4PP
So do I. Although I would have been happy with the first contact, I assume that the chaser wasn’t, and wanted to confirm some info like the callsign or report was correct.
Although nobody gains extra SOTA points [I don’t care about the points and leaque tables anyway] I enjoy working the same chaser on different bands. It’s interesting to see how conditions and reports vary across the bands. Back in May, during a 1-hour activation I worked Eric @F5JKK and Roger @F5LKW on six different bands, from 30m to 10m, which was fun.
Thanks for a great reply. It makes me realize I must have been doing something really wrong, because you were one of my unlogged chasers. I have no idea what happened, but I’m going to be especially careful in the future.
Quality control issue?