Correct summit refs/op times - K9IR May 8, 2018

I’ve become aware that the RBNHole postings for my activations yesterday may have listed the wrong summit as between the second the third summits. I’m not sure why this happened, though I used the “S+1” syntax for the first time and maybe that caused unintended results. Here’s the times for my first and last QSOs from each of the 3 summits I activated on may 8, 2018. feel free to email me directly for clarification/confirmation of which summit i was on when you worked me. Apologies for the confusion.

WI-037: 1637Z to 1708Z
WI-013: 1910Z to 1940Z
WI-015: 2110Z to 2146Z

73 Paula k9ir

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It happened because RBNhole is working from a position of limited knowledge.

To stop it happening, use wildcards. i.e if you plan on doing 3 summits then enter a single alert such as

GM/WS-??? S+8 yada yada yada blah blah

That way you will be spotted each time on WS-??? and your chasers can spot the actual summit when they have heard you give the reference out. I can gurantee you there will be people who logged the summit ref. from SOTAwatch and not what you may have been sending.

An example:

Tue 13:06 OK/G4OOE/P on OK/KR-016 - (Posted by F6FTB) 10.118.1 cw
Tue 13:04 OK/G4OOE/P on OK/KR-0?? - (Posted by RBNHOLE) 10.1181 cw

I was stalking for you from my QTH in the village with my TH5-DX yagi on 20m, but I couldn’t copy you on your spotted frequency.
Same story with some other NA activators on 20m CW at about 17h utc. Tough conditions.
Only a VE1 made it through to me.
73,

Guru

Aha! I always wondered why folks would spot using ?? vs. the specific summit info - now I know. Tnx for the clarification, Andy.

73 Paula k9ir

Guru, I have you in my log from an activation in March 2018. Conditions were quite different yesterday! I usually hear most people at 599, but not so with these recent activations. QSB has been very tough at both ends, as activator and chaser.

Thanks for chasing, and sri we couldn’t make the trip yesterday.

73 Paula k9ir

I’ll keep trying and so you will for sure. We must be nearly at the bottom of the solar cycle, so from this year onwards, conditions can only start slowly improving (hopefully).
I’m sure we’ll make soon.
Keep up the good work!
73/88,

Guru

Without checking the logs, my guess is something like this:

RBNHole builds the concept of a window for each alert - 1 hour prior to alerted time, and 3 hours post alerted time. These windows can be extended using the S-, S+ syntax. When doing multiple summits, it becomes highly likely that there will be an overlap in windows - that two summits could potentially be the one you are on. RBNHole does the tiebreaker simply by checking alert times - which one is closer to your current spot.

So, if you extended the window with S+1, then the chances of overlap were higher, the overlap occurred, but you were closer to the original alerted time.

Something like that, anyway.