I am off to Sardinia in a few weeks for some climbing and SOTA activity. Have just been checking out summits. I am confused by Punta Tricoli IS308. SOTA mapping has this right at the South of Sardinia at Latitude: 39 5 57 N, Longitude: 9 31 5 E. Looking at my map there are no significant hills here. I have found Punta Tricoli IS308 at Latitude 39 51 00 N Longitude 9 32 00 E. Can anyone shed any light on this? Is this a mistake and have I found the correct position!
Have a lovely time in Sardinia. I suppose the thing to do is go to the trig on 308 and take a reading!
Franz (OE5FSM)has found many more summits beyond the 10 listed and sent details to the relevant Association manager but nothing so far has come of it. Of the current 10, 3 as you know (302,303,304), have been activated by Franz.
It might be worthwhile getting in touch with him.
I hope to hear you from some other ones 8) Doing a quick look at the Italian government site it gives the position as - quote:
Adrian, the MT are very well aware that there are some very serious problems with the Italian summits including Sardinia. Italy was one of the last associations which was not verified using SRTM data. So we know there summits in the wrong place, duplicated or simply not valid at P150. We also know there are more P150 summits that are not part of the program.
We’ve thought of various ways of fixing this ranging from suspending the association whilst the data is fixed, to start completely from scratch and everything in between. This doesn’t include some language issues converting some of the concepts of SOTA between English and Italian and back.
I and IS are not the only associations with some problems. As our skills and tools available have improved we are much more capable of only allowing in summits which meet the correct criteria. But that does mean we know of associations which have non-compliant summits. The association managers should weed those out and provide updates to remove them. A lot of AMs have done this. One of Jim’s tasks if verifying existing summits and working with AMs. But if you were the AM for The Peoples Republic of Elbonia for example and you found out that 25% of your summits were to be deleted it’s understandable you’d be a bit upset. The only consolation would be if you were try to get those summits into SOTA now you would fail.
So, yes, we know it’s a bit of a mess. Which is a huge shame because the countryside and mountains there are simply breathtaking. It really needs sorting properely but we are limited in resources to do this never mind the fact there’s another new association, maybe 2, in the pipe for September plus the never ending requests for support in forming new associations from all over the world. Perhaps someone wants to volunteer to help the existing AM and MT?
Helpful to see, that other OMs mention the Sardinian SOTA-situation.
That`s what I told you during our last SOTA-contacts on air.
Neither from the Italian nor from the SOTA-board in UK I got any reaction to my hints concerning additional Sardinian summits. My offer for help is still valid :-).
By the way: I intend to pay another visit to Sardinia at easter 2014…
Hope to see you next weekend. If weather permits, I will activate OE/ST-026 in 2397m
Hi, Franz, as Andy says above we are aware of the problem. In fact we have the locations and heights for many extra summits in the Italian Association, enough to more than double the number already listed, all that needs to be done is for the AM to identify names for the summits, check the data and process them into the database, but there seems to have been no progress. Normally if there are any comments received about summits in any Association we would say “tell the AM” as it is his responsibility…
Bearing in mind what Andy wrote in his response I suppose Sardinia and elsewhere are on a long list of jobs to be done. Yes I hope I catch you next weekend. I wonder which ones you plan to do next year 8)
There has been a lot of noise on the bands for days now 8(
In reply to G6TUH:
002 and 003 Mike. Getting Italy fixed will be an extremely time consuming job and given the constant demand for new associations, it has been difficult scheduling time against that. But I have a complete SRTM DEM analysis of the whole country I and IS0 which indicates that a large number of summits have wrong locations and that there are hundreds of others that could be included. If we chose to put a freeze on all new associations and updates, we could get it done faster, but that doesn’t seem fair to those who are spending considerable amounts of time developing new associations.
73 Jim G0CQK
What I find quite amazing, I managed my first s2s contact with an Italian summit only yesterday!
A quick peek at the Italian summits, reveals that many of the Italian regions have not had a single activation and there are plenty with remarkably little activity.