On this very day 24 years ago was the day that SOTA was born.
Jimmy M0HGY
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Greetings also from here: Mont Fort, HB/VS-114, 10,925 ft., near Verbier. Thanks for still being here for us, SOTA!
Vy 73, Markus HB9DIZ
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Happy Birthday SOTA.
Thank you guys for coming up with such a fantastic idea. Now not only we have SOTA but other programs which encourage hams to work outside their shack.
Chapeau bas.
73 Marek
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Happy Birthday SOTA. Congratulations to Management Stella effort keeping it running smoothly. I first heard of SOTA when I did a search for the IC 703 on my windows 98 computer. It took a few minutes but eventually down loaded a YouTube of Steve and Peanuts and Rooster hiking to Mt Herman. I wondered what on earth he was doing calling CQ SOTA and all these folks calling him back. After another search re SOTA I first found a tractor then eventually found this web site and emailed to ask the Question for vk5. They put me in touch with Wayne who invited me to visit his house to get the search under way for South Australia. That was 2012 in May. I still remember the nervous tension after spending 3 days with Wayne VK3WAM finding all the summits for vk5. I booked a flight to Melbourne to spend those days at Wayne’s house searching for summits on Google Earth and Geo science maps. On my return trip I had a very valuable USB stick with most of the summits on it and as my time with Wayne had run out he sent me through another 100 odd summits a week or so later once he had found them.
Next nervous wait was to get the summit list and ARM written up and sent to Management in UK.
4 day before vk5 goes live I get an email from Jim G4OBK and we organised a Skype sked and had a chat about a few fixes to my list and arranged another Skype once I had done the changes.
Right on time Jim is on Skype and I have the laptop open with the dongle in the side and talking on Skype with the home computer and via team viewer Jim did the big upload to SOTA.UK
All this computer stuff was brand new to me even Wayne taught me how to do a spread sheet to get the list on the computer in the first place. Any how Jim sorted it for me and vk5 went live on 1/10/2012 and I was sitting on my first SOTA summit waiting for the UTC clock to roll over to that day. In the mean time I had also learnt how to put Spots from my phone to SW2 and rounded up a few of my local friends to chase me as not many folks knew about SOTA either at that time.
Great effort folks Congratulations once again as we should reflect on all the hard work done to get all the many associations up and running as well. Thanks to all those who take part in this great activity around the world its quite amazing really.
Regards: Ian vk5cz 
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