I’m going to be staying in the GW and G/WB region in a couple of weeks and I’ve started looking at interesting summits I might try and activate. A strategy I tried was looking to see if there were any summits not yet activated by CW. I found this a bit time consuming and I haven’t had any luck so far but I’ve only just started looking.
But this got me thinking - dangerous I know - as to the best way to analyse a summit by mode. The excellent SOTLAS website shows graphs by band and year but not mode. Is there another way to check other than looking through all the QSOs listed against each activation, which is what I’ve been doing?
From which thoughts my real suggestion arose and it isn’t about analysing results but what about a few extra points for the first activation by a new mode, for example CW or AM? I don’t know how difficult this would be to implement in the database and apologies for suggesting extra work!
As a secondary suggestion, offered tentavily, this could be extended to bands. For example, the first 160m activation. In both cases the qualification would remain 4 QSOs in the new mode or new band.
I’m not trying to make things more complicated but to add new goals for SOTA activators and perhaps chasers too as the existing summits get worked more and more.
There are still many unactivated summits around but not so many near where the majority of SOTA followers live.
We would never award points in the honour rolls for “firsts” of any description. This is because these would never be available to the (hopefully) many participants that follow into the SOTA programme subsequently.
The nearest thing we do is record the first activator for each summit in the database, but even that has its detractors within the MT, for the same reasons as above.
Thanks Tom, I can see the rationale now. If you are the first to use CW then just relax privately in the warm glow - as I have for a solitary Scottish summit.
OK, I give in! I’ve had a look on the SOTA mapping, SOTLAS and the database but can’t find a way to search for summits which haven’t been activated by a specific mode. Is there a way to do this? I can show summits which haven’t been activated but that’s not what I’m looking for at the moment.
No. It’s even somewhat complex doing it on the DB SQL console. You’d have to find all the activated summits and then foreach activation check if there was no CW QSO. That would list all the activated summits without a CW QSO and add the unactivated QSOs. Something that is terribly inefficient as it involves multiple reads of the activationslogs table. Maybe you could do a select of all CW QSOs grouped by Summit and then do a union of that set against all summits and select the remaining. Only have to scan the table once then I think.
If you take the easy way out, you can find all the unactivated summits from the DB on a region by region basis. If it’s unactivated then there are guaranteed no CW QSOs !
The nearest to you are in GM but do include the St. Kilda stacks, which are shall we say a bit of a real challenge. After that France has plenty of unactivated summits as does Norway, Faroes, Iceland etc.
Andy, Thank you, the manual summit by summit approach was what I tried but it was a bit time consuming although checking if there had been any activations on 30m which is easy to do on sotl.as was a quick way of identifying ones not worth looking at further. I’m hoping to visit France and probably Spain next year so it might be best to wait.
Wouldn’t it be easier to do it the other way round? First get the summit of all QSOs with mode CW - something like
SELECT UNIQUE summit FROM all_qsos WHERE mode = ‘CW’
(all_qsos being some JOIN of the raw tables which gives the “flattened” details for every QSO)
Then a bog standard JOIN with the summits table and a further selection of the rows that didn’t match will give you the answer in one pass.
By the way, the pedant in me observes that since you don’t know about activations not recorded in the database, you can only make an “at most” assertion, not “at least”.
I added that group by idea a few minutes after I made the post. I think Martyn gets the email digest and it’s possible his digest doesn’t show the edit.
Yes, I read the original post. Not convinced editing of a post should be allowed after it’s been emailed, though it’s obviously nice to be able to fix simple typos.
I note the smiley but this is a serious point. It will be an activation when it is subsequently recorded. There is always a delay, sometimes short, sometimes long. This is actually another argument against having any kind of “first” award. You can in good faith believe you are doing a “first” something-or-other, but later find out that you weren’t.
When you edit a post you get 5mins grace to fix typos etc. before that becomes version 1. After that the software tracks edits. I’d have thought it should not mail messages till the grace period has expired as the minimum. That should catch most of the quick edits.
