Motivation for SOTA activations

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.