Colombia with great potential SOTA

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Again, I go to the forums to express our willingness to add the summits in Colombia and be able to participate in the activations, we have many colleagues activating POTA and we would love to do SOTA. We already express our willingness to enter the points manually because the official maps made by the government do not meet the requirements of the SOTA administrators. We ask the community for help to make the administrators a little more flexible to add our summits to the program and be able to participate. Thank you. My email alexjaramd@gmail.com my HK4SSI sign Alex Jaramillo, president of the United Amateur Radio Association. HK4RAU.

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As has been explained many times, to add an association there has to be detailed enough mapping so that summits that meet the SOTA requirements can be found.

Of the many hams from Colombia who have contacted us, none have yet have been able to point us at detailed enough mapping.

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Colombia is home to the largest expanse of páramos in the world, a vital ecosystem that provides a large portion of the country’s freshwater.
PĂĄramos:
Colombia has 37 páramos complexes recognized and delimited by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. These complexes are distributed throughout the three mountain ranges and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Together, they represent approximately 50% of the world’s páramos. The largest in the world is the Páramo de Sumapaz, located near Bogotá.
Snow-capped Mountains:
Regarding snow-capped mountains, the situation is different. Due to climate change, Colombia’s tropical glaciers are retreating at an alarming rate. While Colombia once had 19 snow-capped mountains, today there are considered to be only six major snow-capped mountains:

  • Pico CristĂłbal ColĂłn and Pico SimĂłn BolĂ­var (Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta)
  • Sierra Nevada del Cocuy (which includes several snow-capped peaks, such as Ritacuba Blanco)
  • Nevado del Huila
  • Nevado del Ruiz
  • Nevado del Tolima
  • Nevado de Santa Isabel
    Although there are six major snow-capped mountains, some of them, such as Santa Isabel, are in critical condition and their total disappearance is imminent. The potential for SOTA is absolutely attractive to everyone. Unfortunately, our country is not very advanced in the type of maps you require. Again, I can suggest manually entering every mountain, paramo, and glacier that is fully identified on the maps. I have the time and inclination to manually enter them, as well as many of the parks we have included in POTA, which, for the moment, reached number 500 15 days ago. Please help us, Andy. We want to be part of the SOTA program so you can all get to know the wonderful places we have in Colombia. For example, peaks over 5,000 meters: Colombia has several peaks that exceed 5,000 meters in altitude, distributed throughout the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Central and Eastern Cordilleras. Some of the best-known are:
  • CristĂłbal ColĂłn Peak and SimĂłn BolĂ­var Peak (5,775 m)
  • Nevado del Huila (5,364 m)
  • Ritacuba Blanco (5,330 m) in the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy
  • Nevado del Ruiz (5,321 m)
  • Nevado del Tolima (5,215 m)
  • Peaks of the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy: In this mountain range, located in the Eastern Cordillera, there are around 25 peaks above 5,000 meters.
    Furthermore, Colombia has a large number of peaks, snow-capped mountains, and pĂĄramos that, while not reaching 5,000 meters, are considered high altitude and are popular destinations for mountaineering and hiking. The total number of snow-capped peaks and glaciers is approximately 14.
    Let’s work together to be a little more flexible in the requirements. We want to participate and we want to support POTA. I personally have the time and desire to do so. Alex Jaramillo HK4SSI.
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Before the powers that be in SOTA reply to you, let me add a word or two. Firstly, “flexible” is a word which is unknown to the SOTA management team (MT), except when discussing coax cable, or antenna wire. You also mention the word “wonderful” to describe places or summits in Colombia - this is a word which the MT cannot apply to summits, unless they meet a completely arbitrary P150 prominence rule which they like to term “objective.” I can well imagine the mental gymnastics in their heads if they were asked to rate a hill or mountain if it did not meet this rule: “beautiful”, or “wonderful”, or “great fun” would not occur to them. It’s just a rocky/grassy lump which does not come up to specs, something to pass by, something to ignore, not “in the scheme”.

Why “arbitrary”? - since it’s not based on any absolutely objective number which any species or race in the Universe might use, like the inverse of the fine structure constant in physics, a dimensionless number approximating 137 - why don’t we use P137 instead? Instead, the P150 rule is ultimately based on how many digits the average human has on their hand - call that objective, 'coz I don’t?

Anyway, who cares about objective where amateur radio - a hobby - is concerned? I personally care far more about beauty, and wonder, and discovery, and the hill my foot is actually treading on, and the great wide world which knows nothing of petty manager’s rules, and to hell with rules and regulations.

My advice to the amateurs of Colombia? Stick with POTA, forget SOTA, and tell the SOTA MT to GTH.

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Thank you very much, colleague, for the recommendation. Our intention is that all radio amateurs in the world can enjoy all the activities that exist and SOTA seems very interesting to us because our country has so many summits, snow-capped mountains, moorlands and many things that we want to share with you. That is why we ask the SOTA administrators for a little flexibility.

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You haven’t done any research on this Rob. If you had, you’d know that the imperial 500 feet prominence was always traditionally considered to merit “a hill worth climbing” by hillwalkers. The approximate metric equivalent (150m) was therefore adopted by the Relative Hills society, and it was their definition and classification that was adopted at launch by SOTA.

I would encourage you to try and be more measured and polite in your comments as it doesn’t reflect well upon you in print on a screen.

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I simply cannot fathom your mental processes, you chose to bad mouth the MT while trying to discourage Colombian hams from joining SOTA , knowing that by doing so you breach General Rules 3,7,3,3 and 3,7,3,6 and the MT has the power to remove your access. Do you like to live dangerously? I like you, Rob, but I won’t protect you.

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Rather than getting into personal arguments. How about trying to find a way of actually make this happen. Let’s try to support our Colombian friends. As a starting point AI would seem to be one way of starting.

As I understand it Chat GTP could be a start:

GIS method (best accuracy): download SRTM/IGAC DEM tiles for Colombia and run a peak-finding + prominence routine (QGIS/GRASS or Python). This will find all qualifying summits (including unnamed ones) and produce a validated list.

Any disputed summits could be put on a pending list. That would get them started.

I should add, there may be flaws to this plan, I have no practical experience. But I am sure there is enough expertise on this site to get this going.

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Believe me, we have the best intentions to ensure that we can participate in your activities. We are fully committed to collaborating in whatever is necessary to achieve this.

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That’s what we all want. Obviously there are minimum requirements for accessible topological mapping in order to ensure the association is formed in accordance with the same standards as everywhere else. You could argue that where those standards cannot be met that we just fudge it with AI, but I personally don’t find that acceptable.

AI still thinks that it was Wimbledon that knocked Macclesfield Town out of the 1988 FA Cup when it was actually Port Vale. AI doesn’t cut it for what is required for SOTA topographical analysis unfortunately.

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You are using the wrong AI Tom.
'Macclesfield Town were eliminated from the 1987–88 FA Cup in the third round, losing 1–0 to Port Vale at Vale Park on Sunday, 10 January 1988 .

The lone—and decisive—goal was scored by Kevin Finney .’

The method I suggested, just uses AI to search maps. it is not generating ‘information’. What criteria are we using to say the maps are not accurate enough?

Whilst is is recognised that land parcel boundaries may not be totally accurate Horizontal position is typically within 5 to 10 meters (varies by scale)
Vertical/elevation data ±5 to 10 meters.
Source: RedALyC Study

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Thanks everyone for participating. My language is Spanish, and I apologize for the translator, but we’re definitely asking for help to include our country in SOTA. The potential is truly huge.

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Which AI has given you that (correct) information?

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Tom, ChatGPT. It’s web search tool tends to be better in my experience and it references sources.

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Let’s put it to the test


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To return to and clarify the discussion re Colombia: over the last eleven years we have had six queries about Colombia. On each occasion we looked at what data was available. The main difficulty that halted progress was that the locally available maps had contours at 50m intervals making it very difficult to identify cols - for prominence we need to identify the summit AND the cols with accurate elevations to ensure that the prominence is correct. We could fall back on SRTM data but despite its panoply of accuracy it does have some problems, some types of terrain that cause confusion. There is talk of a better SRTM data set becoming available eventually, but on the last investigation the team concluded that we did not have good enough data available to go ahead with.

Be clear that we never say NO, we just say wait until we have the necessary data. There are quite a few future Associations waiting for better mapping.

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Hi Brian,
It appears that Google Maps’ terrain maps of Colombia now have contours at 20-meter intervals; however, Google cannot be considered an official government mapping system, and so accuracy cannot be guaranteed. A more accurate version of the SRTM data would be welcome, as you say, for many countries.

Google Maps

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Firstly, it’s ChatGPT, not GTP and secondly, that first step is something we already do. It doesn’t produce a list of validated or qualifying summits. It produces a list of candidates. Typically, that list of candidates will have somewhere between 10 and 30% of summits not qualifying once map surveying happens, and maybe 20-30% will need shifting to a different location (harder number to quantify so based on my personal experience).

I encourage you to read the following to understand some of the technical problems that manifest around it:

Then I would suggest you read a bit about Large Language Models and the problems they solve, versus the problems they don’t. ChatGPT, useful though it is for some things, is not optimised as a text processing large language model to be doing summit validation for SOTA. Some other form of ML may help but Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude are not it.

What I have been thinking about lately is how do we quantify summits that are not at risk of being eliminated from the candidates list - it requires a measure of the bumpiness of the surrounding terrain, but I haven’t yet wrapped my head mentally around how that might work in code. Basically finding a key col and ensuring there’s not too many <P150 sub summits within that col’s catchment area/contour tree or something. If this could be quantified, it could be used to potentially determine starter lists of low-risk summits, but we’re nowhere near that yet.

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Hola Alex. No sĂ© cuĂĄntas veces has insistido en esto pero como te explicaron otros colegas no es tan simple. Ya hubieron otros como por ejemplo PerĂș que como Colombia con un grandĂ­simo potencial
 bueno, cualquier paĂ­s que estĂ© cruzado por la Cordillera de los Andes lo tiene, con la intenciĂłn de unirse al programa pero tambiĂ©n tropezaron con la misma piedra. Algunos no pueden conseguir la cartografĂ­a adecuada que exige el programa SOTA y los que la consiguen tienen un valor extremadamente alto.
PodrĂ­as consultar a los distintos manager de Argentina ya que por el peculiar formato de callsign tienen aproximadamente 12 asociaciones dentro del territorio.
Mucha suerte y ojalĂĄ pronto puedan participar.
73 de JP3PPL, Takeo

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Hola Alex,

Estoy seguro de que en Colombia hay muchas cimas de montaña que se podrån clasificar y crear un catålogo para SOTA. El problema es cómo se crea ese catålogo.

Para que se pueda hacer se necesita estudiar mapas cartogrĂĄficos precisos y parece que la dificultad es que no es fĂĄcil obtenerlos, porque quizĂĄ no existan.

He realizado una bĂșsqueda rĂĄpida en Internet y encuentro estas pĂĄginas:

  1. Instituto GeogrĂĄfico AgustĂ­n Codazzi - IGAC
    https://www.igac.gov.co/

  2. Algunos mapas topograficos en PDF:
    Colombia en mapas

AllĂ­ tienen alojados algunos mapas descargables en PDF

  1. Mapa topografico , pero no sirve sin curvas de nivel
    Map Viewer

Y en esa misma web, Ă©ste otro mapa, tampoco es vĂĄlido
https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=23dc1680e5dd44bfb7cb877b044286a7

Mientras no localices un mapa topogrĂĄfico actualizado que muestre esas curvas de nivel serĂĄ muy difĂ­cil que el equipo gestor (MT) realice los estudios para confirmar el catĂĄlogo.

Mi sugerencia es que consultes escribiendo a los organismos de Gobierno de Colombia o a asociaciones de Montaña para ver dónde localizar estos mapas con datos precisos.

Suerte y un cordial saludo
73. Ignacio

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