There has been much discussion about the facilities provided by the SOTA Management Team and the availability of these services to everybody free of any direct charge. It may come as a surprise to some that these IT facilities do cost a great deal of money to provide.
Currently we supply and actively support the following:
SOTA website
SOTA spotting and alerting facility
SOTA Reflector
SOTA mapping project
SOTA database
SOTA shopping site
Mobile phone spotting
and much much more that is not immediately obvious.
Supporting these facilities are a small number of professional IT personnel who provide their services free of charge, just because they enjoy SOTA. These facilities have to be supported on professional, and therefore costly, servers and these are funded by the Awards scheme, merchandise sales and donations.
Over the years we have managed to build a small surplus from Award and merchandise sales ( based on our exclusive use of our Copyright and Trademark logo - something that seems to escape the notice of certain bodies who recently have pirated the logo for their own commercial ends) and the very generous donations made by a few participants. That surplus is now being eroded by the need to utilise increasingly expensive servers around the World and provide redundancy as necessary to support the demands made on the IT facilities.
We do not wish, and have no intention, of charging for the SOTA services so now I am appealing to the greater community to help support the Summits on the Air awards scheme. You may not collect Awards and have no great interest in the merchandise but it would help us all if you were to find it in your ability to make a small donation towards the ongoing costs.
Relevant pages can be found at the following URL’s:
Merchandise & Awards: https://sota-shop.co.uk/categories.php
Donations: https://sota-shop.co.uk/donations.php
Thank you
Barry GM4TOE
on behalf of the SOTA Management Team