@MM0EFI I’m guessing you tried to gate crash the rally so the mini had to tow you off the track?? 
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My motivation is the combination of two hobbies I enjoy a lot: (Obviously) hiking and ham radio. Because I enjoy both I do not look for the minimum. This means I often don’t take the easiest and shortest way to the summit, and whenever feasible I do more than 4 QSOs.
Thanks to SOTA I found many new (for me) and fascinating summits and areas of our country which otherwise I probably wouldn’t have visited.
73, Fritz
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I’ll offer a motivation. For the one out here that is unable to safely activate a summit, I treasure the QSO. I operate SOTA QRP, so most often, WE have accomplished a valid 2-way QRP contact. The competition involved in getting through adds to the fun. A huge part of SOTA for me are the write-ups of your activation, beautiful pictures and the occasional YouTube video. Believe it or not, activations are a service appreciated by the envious ones at home.
My main request for activators is that you stay safe and if that requres a buddy going with you, all the better. I’d rather have an empty log than have a fellow ham injured trying to get on.
Happy climbs. 72
Carl WB0CFF
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I think that many want to blame Morse, when the real problem is what they did not want to study or make the effort to learn Morse. If we compare the number of new hams today with the number of new hams 40 or 50 years ago, I would say that now without the Morse requirement there are fewer hams or possibly the same. Those who made the effort, obtained it and those who did not want to make that effort were left watching from the outside.
I obtained my first license in 1994 (Argentina) and in those years ALL applicants had to take a transmission and reception exam at 10WPM.
I took the course at a radio club and I remember that 99% of my classmates hated Morse but they wanted to obtain their licenses and to achieve this they made the effort and successfully passed the part corresponding to Morse. When we got our licenses I was the only one who stayed with the CW and the rest went into other modes or just dropped the hobby.
The Morse code used to be a requirement but not a barrier as many want to show it.
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I was part of that 99%, licensed in 2000 not long before the Morse requirement went away. Personally, I think you’re seeing survivor bias – the 99% of people who hated learning morse were people who really wanted to get their tickets. There’s no shame in being an amateur with only moderate motivation. Casual is great. But they were all weeded out of the process.
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Yes! Because that 99% really wanted their licenses they study and practiced hard the code, because they understood that was just a requirement and not a barrier.
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I think there are many more issues than motivation for learning morse. Simplifying it to this group and that is not fair to the many people who for their own legitimate reasons, find morse difficult to learn or use. Some have difficulty hearing keyed tones and translating those noises into the symbols. Some have tried learning before but were apparently using a method that wasn’t suitable for their learning mode. And they cannot tell you what their learning mode is.
Past difficulties can form an impenetrable barrier and nothing you or I say will get them past that barrier. No discussion of how few characters there are to learn, or how repetition is the key to learning will help those potential learners. They just find it difficult, too difficult to begin learning yet again. I feel for those people because they have tried and now find it just impossible to start again. Like learning juggling, there are a lot of things going on here, and no amount of theory will help. I still haven’t learned to juggle 3 balls. But that does not make me a lesser human.
73 Andrew VK1DA/VK2DA
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Before SOTA there was backpacking in the Calif. Sierras, and always carrying a modified 5 transistor radio and xtal based transmitter. Then there was the KX1 portable radio. Pre SOTA used this for a few peaks. When SOTA was launched I modified trips to target peaks along the way. Great fun. Now as I am getting a few points under my antenna I find myself focusing the mountain trips strictly on peaks. I sure have been up a lot of hills that I would have never known of or wanted to summit.
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Dear all
Just remembered that I had written here in the reflector on this motivation topic after having achieved my Mountain Goat in 2019. So I went back to read this and to review it with my experience of 3 more years.
https://reflector.sota.org.uk/t/hb9diz-mountain-goat/20274/21
Yes, still true and still simple enough. The core for me is that I don’t do SOTA only as a pure amateur radio activity paired with a pure hiking activity. In general, SOTA for me is giving an additional meaning to a pile of stones called a summit. The summit is in its region, similar or different to my home region and easy or difficult, it offers its cultural environment being similar or different too. And the activator has to be nourished, so cuisine offers further insights that are always different from home.
Thus I enjoy especially SOTA holidays where I can discover the summits from a remote location. My curiosity bases on “Medium te (mundi) posui ut circumspiceres” – “I have put you amidst (the world) so that there you can better perceive all that”, following the ideas of Pico della Mirandola, an Italian philosopher of the Renaissance era.
But the real core for me is that SOTA is an activity with other people: radio partners on the frequency, local people living there resp. visiting and seeing all of this on holidays (or shorter day trips) together with my partner, with four eyes. That provides a feeling to me to be rich in an invisible way. And it supports the fire to continue.
So radio and hiking are somehow only on a second level for me. I don’t need to question my antenna constantly, and I can enjoy simple 1-pointers and their beauty, depending on what my health and age still permit to me.
I take note that some aspects are more and more routine now, so the effect of the SOTA medicine may fade out over time. But I would consider it a wrong way to simply make more SOTA then or do more spectacular SOTA or to do SOTA for its own sake to compensate this routine, like drugs being taken at a higher dosis. I assume that I will keep my bandwith as written above since it has proven now for more than five years for me to have good effects.
Vy 73 de Markus, HB9DIZ
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… in the beginning there was the combination of two wonderful hobbies, as many have written here before.
Today I like to stay on summits for hours, working every chaser and activator I can hear and enjoy nature at the same time. Every now and then I adapt my activation schedule to the times when DX can be heard and worked.
Further motivation includes being on the right side of the pile-up and optimizing my equipment in terms of weight and perfomance.
What I probably like most about SOTA is the comradship among chasers and activators and the fairly high standard by which most SOTeros operate.
73, Roman
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I would say that it was a barrier for me. As a young person I made a few half-hearted attempts at learning MC, but never stayed with it long enough. At the age of 57 I finally got my license after MC was no longer required. So, what is the only thing I am interested in doing now? Yes. Morse Code.
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Motivation for SOTA activations:
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Checkpoint for physical fitness
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Intense family time with daughter (often)
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Visit places I would never go without this program
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Being part of a great community, serving the chasers, finding new friends.
73 andy DL2DVE
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well, then the problem was not the CM but yours. You were your own barrier (Please, I say it with all respect, don´t get me wrong)
I think many confuse ¨Can do it¨ with ¨Want to do it¨
All without exception, we have capabilities. Some will be faster and some will be slower, but sooner or later we can. The problem is if we ¨Want to do it¨
You already have the ¨Can do it¨, you just have to put into practice the ¨Want to do it¨
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I guess if you want to define barrier that way, OK.
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This is genuinely hilarious.
I want to go over there, but there’s a wall in my way. It’s very hard to climb over, so I’m having trouble getting past that barrier.
“No, the wall is not a barrier. You are the barrier because you don’t want to spend forever training to climb over the wall.”
I don’t care about walls. If the wall weren’t acting as a barrier, I’d be able to get there just fine. It is literally the barrier preventing my progress.
“Exactly! The wall has nothing to do with it. I’m glad we agree.”
Learn code, don’t learn code. Operate CW or not. This is a big and multifaceted hobby with room for lots of different people with lots of different approaches to radio. Which makes it great. Gatekeeping while pretending to not be gatekeeping, not so great.
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Over the years I’ve heard people make dozens of excuses saying they couldn’t because of this and that. When time showed that they really could. For that reason I say that the barrier is oneself. Now if you want to make a hyperbole of what I wrote, that’s up to you.
You can disagree with me and that’s respectable. I just made a difference between ¨Can do¨ and ¨Want to do¨
The only thing I ask of you when you want to comment on something I’ve written, don’t do it ironically.
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This part of the conversation started when someone suggested that fewer people participated in amateur radio due to morse requirements. Regardless of whether it’s a “barrier” or other people failing up to live to their true potential, the result is the same.
Morse requirement + someone who can’t do it = one less person in amateur radio
Morse requirement + someone who won’t do it = one less person in amateur radio
The only way that isn’t bourn out is if you also get a LOT of
Morse requirement + someone who is attracted by the additional exclusivity of the morse requirement.
Those people undoubtedly exist – and they’re awesome, because they take this very seriously. But is there any suggestion that they outnumber the first two groups?
Whether that’s a barrier by any definition, the consequence of human frailty, the result of people running up against personal limitations, you still get the same outcome. If you make an activity harder to participate in, on average fewer people will choose to participate in it.
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I think you and I understand the expression ¨Half hearted¨ right?
Well, Kelly said ¨I made a few half hearted atempts…¨ Now do you understand why I say that Morse is not the problem, but that the problem is in oneself? Kelly showed that he is not a limited guy since at his 57 years old he does CW.
With this it is proven that if he wanted to, in his youth he would have passed the CM exam but since he was ¨Half hearted¨ he couldn’t. I simply transcribed his attitude and I think that I did it respectufully and without ironies.
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Never have brought a chair, or a 100 watt radio, almost never an HT. Before SOTA, and before the very effective tiny radios, as a trail-runner, I would often reach a high mountain overlook and wonder, “what could be done from such a place with QRP and a simple antenna?” I had just finished building a KD1JV ATS3 kit and was puzzling over antenna and power source, when I learned what SOTA was. Initially I had interest in achieving MG, since then SOTA is additional motivation, never the sole motivation, to get outside, explore different peaks in the area, play with different details of set-up, and do a little CW from a beautiful location. - fred kt5x
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In other words, there are no barriers in life.