Just curios where the location data comes from for this map. A couple of my contacts didn’t show up. Is it because they do not have a SOTA account or if they have one they did not enter their location in their account?
2 Likes
Exactly that. But this feature is according to my knowledge being improved in the future.
But you can still use the activation map feature on the Activations - list and display on map SOTA activations - sotamaps.org
page. This usually shows more as it falls back to user provided locators.
73 Joe
2 Likes
Thanks, Joe, I kind of thought I was on the right track and your answer confirms it.
73,
Ron, NR3E 
1 Like
There’s an added complication when you’re away from home, too. I occasionally chase the odd SOTA activation from Kenya using 5Z4/M0LEP, but there’s no way I can tell the SOTA system about the distinctly different location (KI88jp in this case), as there’s only space for one…
1 Like
Thinking about this from a purely data-centric point of view, it would be possible in such cases to generate a default position based on the country. There exist online tables or data sets of center-of-country positions (example), which could be used as a last resort by a programmer intent on showing as many chaser locations as possible.
A further complication is presented by the fact that many people change their QTH from time to time: if a chaser’s QTH information is recently updated, it may not reflect where they were 5 years ago when they made a QSO with an activator. One way around that would be to include an extra field for the “current chaser locator” in the database table which stores each chaser/activator QSO. But, seriously, who in their right mind would go to all that trouble?
To my mind, what we have right now in the collection of SOTA applications is a pretty good option for the price we pay.