True and I am more than happy to be proven wrong!
As it stands though we need another 278 summits to be activated to hit 10% (which it is interesting to note is more than there are summits in England and Northern Ireland combined).
The small number of activators we have and the inaccessibility/difficulty of the majority of our summits makes that quite the challenge.
I had great times with SOTA. Many, many thanks for this!
Now Iām going QRT. Your game, your rules. Sorry to say, but this is no more my game.
CUL, maybe at GMA, WWFF, WCA ā¦
73!
Vasek, OK2VWB
As for me, whereas SOTA is not inherently a competitive activity, the worst point is that the ratio between being a keen walker and an avid car driver is getting worse by the day. The SOTA rules should be a bit smarter and not based only on the topographic prominenceā¦ However, less frequent does not mean less acceptable or forgotten 
73 and good luck to MT
Karel OK2BWB
Hello everyone,
Amateur radio is above all a hobby that should fulfill and please us, and not divide it into different castes !!!
Personally, I have always taken SOTU as a pleasant relaxation with the radio in beautiful nature, and thanks to that I visited the peaks and places I would probably never otherwise visit, thank you for the fact that it was so!
Unfortunately, now there will be significantly fewer of them, we must take it simply as it is!
For me, SOTA has never been a race or a hunt for points, and never will be !!
David OK4KOP
David, you put it very accurately. Thatās gone now.
Indeed. The ZS association is another example of an early association with poor data initially that ended up adding about 3000 summits when the local teams got back into it 10+ years later. A substantial percentage of those initial summits (at least 80%) were wrong or with incorrect locations, but the end result was actually a large addition.
Without fear or favour is true. If we left OK, a percentage complain. We fix OK, a percentage complain. We half-arse the fixing of OK, a percentage complain. I donāt recommend joining the MT if you are someone that needs constant praise.
The sun is shining on the campsite Matt - looking at the steam rising from the Ignis car roof. Condx to OK on 20m very good. SP6SUD/P solid 57 SSB just now from OK/KR-010.
Good luck!
Phil
Less than 30 minutes this morning between SP6SUD being QRV on HF on OK/KR-010 and QRV on HF on OK/KR-068. I presume (at least) one of these summits doesnāt meet SOTA requirements.
I understand the natural disappointment of the OK activators above, but we simply have one country that decides its own rules for summit eligibility, when virtually all the other 177 assocIations are fully compliant.
I am confident this situation arose innocently through language issues and previous lesser technology and availability for accurate topographic mapping, but we are now in a position to make this correct.
Hi Tom,
where is the compliance ?? Each country is different, and in a way specific, nothing will ever be the same, just as people will never live in complete harmony!
Compliance lies in the summit list being in accordance with clearly stated rules. Every country is different, mountains can take on a multitude of shapes, but topographic prominence is either there or it isnāt there.
The requirements are stated in the General Rules document on the SOTA website.
I never really liked the harvester approach on the 10 point SOTAs, so I will not really be missing that. What I will be missing though is the summits being around. In OK the summits were uniformly distributed over the entire country, so wherever you were going on a trip, there was always a SOTA you could activate. This will be gone. I am afraid that due to the nature of our country, the only SOTAs left will be the ones in the borderlands, where the mountains make a natural border.
If this is good or not we can argue for hours, but thatās about all what we can do about it. MT has decided. MT makes the rules not us.
I am afraid that back in the day when SOTA was just one of many programmes on air, long before SOTA became such phenomena that even Japanese manufacturers started making transceivers for it, the rules for joining in were not that strict, because the MT was probably happy that somebody shown interest. Today the BATNA of the MT is on a completely different level.
This is certainly true. However, it was recognised that those initial rules were not workable for a major international programme many years ago, and were changed. Most associations that needed to worked cooperatively with MT to maintain full compatibility with the General Rules. It is a pity that a handful of associations remain not fully compliant, but at least they can be satisfied that they have enjoyed the bonus of many years with non-compliant summits. Most associations have not had this.
The rules around P150 have been around since the beginning, but the ability to enforce this has been steadily increasing over the years. As Tom says, you can look at it as being upset about losing a privilege you never were entitled to, or you can be grateful for the beneficial treatment over the years. The revision to the OK association has been forewarned for years - at least from the 2014 revision to DM iirc
I did not intent to make any statement on what the rules were formally, but rather on the acceptance threshold by the MT back then. And exactly as we three just agreed on, the negotiation position of the MT was very weak back then. Today, when SOTA has worldwide interest, the negotiation position of the MT is unmatched and the MT can, de facto, dictate the conditions. You take it or you leave it. I am not saying that this is necessarily wrong or innatural, but it is where the initial problem stemmed from.
Back when SOTA started, it was hard work sorting out which summits could be included. First you needed to get hold of detailed maps with height contours marked, then for each summit you had to follow the contour at -150 metres and make sure that it didnāt wander off and circle a higher summit, this was easy for nice symmetrical summits, but there were never very many of those! Following contours that snaked about all over the place could drive you mad! Now, of course, the satellite mapping and the computers have almost automated the process. Back in the day, as you put it, Marek, the MT would have had difficulties in getting hold of complete map sets for other countries such as OK and would not have had the manpower to analyse them and sort out a summit list in a reasonable time, so this task was left to the AM and his helpers and the MT had to take their results on trust. We know now that problems sometimes arose because of translation and understanding of the meaning of āprominenceā so that some of those early summit lists did not comply with our rules. Even now some people have trouble understanding the concept. Despite this, the concept of prominence is the soul and centre of SOTA, without it we would have no rigorous definition of a summit.
Prominence-Isolation concept could be the benefit of using modern digital toolsā¦
Karel
Not sure if the ā¦ is supposed to be a suggestion but thatās exactly what we do now. Modern digital tools, map checked against government mapping. Turns out that increased accuracy isnāt always appreciated
