I am glad to announce the establishment of SOTA association K0M - Minnesota, effective Oct. 1, 2013. The state has 33 qualifying summits grouped into three regions: Northeast, Centralwest, and Southeast.
The ARM and list of summits are available in PDF format at http://goo.gl/g1e5pV. You can download the manual by clicking the arrow in the upper-left portion of the screen. In addition, an unofficial Google map of the summits is available at http://goo.gl/h8jDAc.
Summits will eligible for activator and chaser credit as of 0001 UTC on Oct. 1. It may take some time for the SOTA cluster and official websites to be updated with the new summit data.
Many thanks to Guy N7UN, Steve WG0AT, Bill W4RK, and Jim G0CQK for their work on getting K0M up and running over the past month. I will serve as association manager for at least an interim period.
Minnesota has a proud outdoors tradition and I hope the new association will encourage hams here and elsewhere to explore this great state!
I’m already checking maps and my work schedule. Unfortunately, even though I’m in Minnesota, the closest summits are nearly as far as the Black Hills from here in the flat prairies! But I’ll see what I can do to get one activated in the near future.
K0M summits have been uploaded to the database and will be active tomorrow, 1-Oct-2013. So you can log them in activations and chases. They’ll appear in SOTAwatch in the next few days and then you’ll be able to spot them.
I can’t post an alert since it’s not “live” yet, but I plan to activate K0M/SE-003 tomorrow (Tuesday). I know - it’s only a 1 point summit, but hey, it’s the first K0M summit activated!
It’s a long drive to the other side of the state, but the summit is in a state park so access should be OK. (Some of the other candidates I considered are all on private land - too iffy for a long trip!)
I hope to be on the air around 1700Z but that’s an estimate at this point. I’m tentatvely planning on starting on 12M, then working down - hopefully can work some EU. I’m sure that 20M will be the workhorse: 14.342 +/- QRM and 14.062. Finally I’ll drop down to 30M to see if there’s any close-in stuff.
I’m assuming I will not be able to self-spot tomorrow, unless I use some pseudo-designator - I will use W0/XX-XXX which will spot. I’d sure appreciate help with spots too, with the correction in the notes: K0M/SE-003. Sound OK?
I hope the propagation is good for us all tomorrow!
Please listen for me too Randy, I’m heading for Babbitt Peak W6/NS-132 so I can hopefully work you S2S (and anyone else who wants to work me).
There is an active fire lookout on top of Babbitt, and when I was up there last year, the lookout lady gave me the third degree about my radio gear. She is a federal employee. With the federal government shutting down, I’m hoping she gets furloughed so I can have the whole danged mountain to myself.
73,
Eric, KU6J
Troublemaker in Training
Aspires to Be Elliott’s Troublemaking Equal
My colleague Jon GM4ZFZ was up wth the larks this morning and has updated SOTAwatch so it talks to the new database server and also imported the new K0M, GM and YO summits. Spotting and alerting will work fine for these new summits.
Oh it seems that my never-before-seen really strange charcters did indeed exterminated every good intention the database had for unusual letters.
Sorry for that, I will pray to the gods of Unicode to have mercy on us and to banish the demons of a zillion codepages back to hell
Considering the number of things which have changed over the last few days (SQL server, Web server) and the fact I forgot to update Tom’s summit uploader plus the fact that every time I look at Google Docs it has changed, well I’m surprised anything worked for this update cycle!
I’d like to fix the missing data in my new GM summits ( it causes an exception when trying to cast System.DBNull to System.String). That requires a few manual SQL update commands. Then I’ll pass on an updated uploader to Tom so he doesn’t have to type a great long DB connection string in every time he uploads a region. I’d like to see if I can find the source of the unexpected bonus points as well. I’m sure there is something lurking that caused a number of W6 regions to acquire bonus points which they’re not entitled to have.
When we’ve done those, we’ll look into where the Romanian names got broken and reupload the names. They should work with what we have. That should also fix the exported summits. The code there sets UTF-8 IIRC, and dumps the whole database summits info out. So it’s dumping out the garbage chars we have uploaded and I don’t think has any issues. I’m happy to be updated on that!
All of those fixes should get us back to where we were yesterday except we have K0M, and new YO & GM summits. At that point we can sneakily reupload the broken W6 regions and rescore the database and hope those who have an inflated score don’t notice. Then it will be time for November’s update and then it’s Christmas and then… and then… the sun will go Nova and I wont need to worry that everything stayed working whilst I was asleep
