The SOTA MT would like to welcome a new association into the SOTA community.
It is a small group of islands making up the UK South Atlantic group and include:-
Ascension Island AI
Gough Island GI
St Helena SH
and
Tristan da Cunha IC
Good luck with your contacts with the small team activating SOTA today on AI
They may use either call ZD8V or ZD8W
Rob G0HRT
p.s. News on updating associations will be added here.
OH wow nice challenges just reaching let alone breaking any pile up 
Karl
Hi Karl,
I’ve worked Ascension and St Helena Islands from a summit, but never heard Gough or Tristan da Cunha.
73 Mike
You’re not likely to hear Gough island or the two other little ones, Inaccessible Island and Nightingale Island. They are uninhabited. (I think Gough island might have some seasonal workers attending to its nature reserve requirements.) Because of their nature-reserve status activations of Gough and Inaccessible islands would be difficult to arrange, but apparently tourist visits to Nightingale Island are allowed.
Hi Rob,
I pesume these are regions within the association? Otherwise GI will be a problem as the top part of an Island just to the west of where you are already uses GI!
Is the association ZD ?? So these new summits will be ZD/AI-nnn, ZD/GI-nnn etc. ?
Ed.
P.S. - I see no Alerts for any ZD activations either today (30th. November) or tomorrow (1st. December).
Hi,
I have worked the islands except Gough. That said the last time was in October 2010 (Tristan da Cunha) on 28.470Mhz/SSB at 1530 hours (ZD9AH). Now six years on with Sol being what it is…? Attached a link with some nice pics and information.
Cheers
Mike
Great and thanks to all that made this possible!
Considering the size of their ham populations ZD7 and ZD8 have been worked 52 times from summits. Mostly on 28/24MHz but a few times on 21 and 14MHZ. Best contact goes to a German station who worked ZD7 on 144MHz. He was using SSB and not FM though, so it’s not that impressive. If he’d done it on 2m FM then that would be notable.
Hi, as regards Gough Island, just looked through my notes. Check out
on QRZ David ZD9A - a got away for me.[quote=“G4TJC, post:4, topic:14262”]
You’re not likely to hear Gough island or the two other little ones, Inaccessible Island and Nightingale Island. They are uninhabited.
[/quote]
Yes there are indeed four regions listed to ZD island group. We are still discussing final name which has to be short enough to fit a SOTA database title /heading block.
North/south propagation seems favourable to UK at times and on a number of different bands. Whilst I have only worked base stations on 40m, I look forward to trying /P on higher bands.
Nice. I hope he gets another posting there!
Yes Simon,
Absolutely! 
Hi Mike,
Peter ZD7FT, can be heard regularly, I’ve worked him 3 times from a summit. However, Ascension Island is not so easy. When I worked Ascension more than three years ago from G/SP-013, it was ZD8LP, Bob, who usually operates as VP8LP. Never heard it before or since.
73 Mike
I had a QSO with Peter 10m QRP from G/SC-013 a little while back. Chatting with my son a few miles away one minute and then St Helena the next - quite a blast!
Looking forward to S2S with ZD some day.
Well you need to be active when there’s an HF oriented group there.
Looking at the many ZD8 QSOs with activators, they all seem to be around the time of contest groups being on site. That makes sense with a contest group having good ears. Well some contest groups have good ears…
FM again? MM0FMF.
FM again? MM0FMF.
GM0FM again? MM0FMF.
GM0FMF is OK? Negative MM0FMF.
OK got it now GM0FMF you are 59kilowatt QRZ?
What fantastic news.
I have been to ZD8 before with work, and I will keep my fingers crossed that I will get another opportunity, hopefully next year sometime.
When do you expect to have the summits populated in the database, and available for users to see?
Regards,
Dave,
G4ZAO
They’re all in now. We set ZD/AI - Ascension Island start to 21-nov-2016 but we were delayed getting the data in place due to vacations and a misbehaving DB server (it was timing out and running slow, I took the decision not to update when in that state.)
The others start tomorrow.
You can see the AI summits at SOTA Database when you select “ZD - UK South Atlantic”. The others wont appear till tomorrow. You can go to SOTA Database and enter “ZD/” into the box and you can see the full set and their details.
The name UK South Atlantic will change to something better… I needed a name and we hadn’t decided how to abbreviate the full name of British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha so it would fit in the box on the display!
Like wise and I’ve waked over ZD/AI-001 a few times.
I wonder if I can swing a work visit in the next year before I retire 
Further changes:
There has been a partial update to OZ, a big update to W7W and a large update is pending for OE which has yet to be uploaded. The OE update has to be done carefully as it exercises a bug in the database code that it exposed before. The issue is to do with summits which were deleted and then added again as the database cannot (yet) cope with holes in the validity window. We hope the OE update will get around that but I’d like to be sure… Anyway, the OE team is aware and their patience is appreciated.
W7U / W4A / W4T have new AMs. The data is correct on the database (www.sotadata.org.uk) and will be updated on the summits pages on the SOTA website by the weekend (www.sota.org.uk). I have been extending some of the tools I use to make updating the AM and region info easier for us to use. Likewise the summits team have been busy both working with existing AMs for these and other updates that are in progress and in helping speculative AMs wih new associations.
The scale of the work is best expressed by the fact a few South American countries if fully supported could add around 40000 (forty thousand) new summits to the program.
I was just on Ascension with Oliver (ZD8W) to operate the CQ WW DX contest. Had to depart on the RAF / MOD flight on Friday 02- Dec. Setting up a SOTA association was an after thought - consequently the approval and start date created a time crunch. The highest summit (an 8 pointer) is Green Mountain which is a very interesting fun hike. We had been up there before the start date approval came through - so I can provide the following field report:
The top of the Green Mountain is in a cloud forest - - which means the trail can be slippery in areas - and I would recommend taking a trekking pole along for stability. Also at the top is a thick stand of bamboo trees (not native). Probably would suffice as antenna support.
73, Alan K0AV / ZD8V