The points are not awarded on any basis other than altitude. How easy it is to reach the summit, for example the existence of a road, is not a factor, partly because it would mean surveying every summit as there may be roads not yet mapped.
What counts as a 10 pointer is down to the regional manager as I understand it, based on the range of altitudes available in the region. In GI you have two 10 point summits. The lowest is 851m. In Italy there is one summit I found at 849m which is just a 1 pointer !
I would be grateful for what you have. Where I live the nearest 10 point summit is well over 200 miles away and the highest summit in the G/DC region is just 4 points.
I don’t think there’s been that much heat in the response, and if you have felt that way, then I must apologise on behalf of everyone here - we’re not attacking you, but debating the merits of the proposal.
Basically, this comes up about every two years. The MT is actually quite open to the idea of evolving the program, but no one has come up with a system that doesn’t introduce other issues with scoring or require major effort required to implement.
There are two considerations the MT need to think about:
There are 400,000+ activations in the database, with 4.6 million+ chaser entries corresponding to those. If something changes, what happens to those activations? Would that result in someone who is a Mountain Goat or Shack Sloth suddenly not being one? How do we retrospectively determine what level of difficulty was involved?
and, what is going to be required to implement this? We’re a volunteer organisation, and it’s tough for us to find time to make large changes in and around our day jobs and adding new summits. Things like evaluating difficulty is a) subjective and b) require us to update every one of the 149,434 summits (expired and otherwise) with a difficulty rating. This isn’t feasible, and generally the person suggesting it isn’t the person offering to do the work either
So, the conversation peters out, and pops back up a year or two later.
To give a simple explanation for the points, no more than 10% of an association will be 10 point
summits, and the rest of the points bands will be roughly equal in size (both numbers and height range).
There are a few associations that the points bandings predate these general rules of thumb. We have adjusted some associations after the fact (eg, VE7) generally to make things fairer
As mentioned by others, the blue star on SOTA Maps is related to GPS tracks, not paths to the summit. It’s actually probably negatively correlated with whether there’s a path there, as people tend to submit GPS tracks for summits where the path isn’t clear.
You are wrong there John, the only 10 pointer in GI is Slieve Donard GI/MM-001. I am interested to know which other summit in GI you thought was a 10 pointer as I have activated all the SOTA summits in GI and the only 10 pointer I activated there was Slieve Donard GI/MM-001.
Hi Ingo. Some time ago there was a thread about how the SOTA program was maintained (certificates, trophies, donations …) and I had an idea so that in less time many activators could arrive at a certificate and this would allow more people to order one, thus increasing the income of money to SOTA.
I sent an email to whom it corresponded, but I never received answers (I even check the spam!)
My idea was based on the somewhat ¨unfair¨ aspect of the scoring system since many, not having the luck of living with higher scoring peaks, take a very long time to achieve a simple certificate. For this reason and having the criteria of 10 pts as a maximum, why not allow the 1-2 point peaks to be activated throughout the calendar year until obtaining 10pts (2pts up to 5 times, 1pts up to 10 times), I am not talking about to make things easier, but to give more chances.
Thanks William. Nothing wrong in asking questions. Surely that’s what a forum like this is for? It’s interesting to read the perspective of your grandson - just shows that something that is obvious to one person may not be to someone else. Hope you manage to enthuse him about amateur radio and SOTA and enjoy some lovely grandfather and son moments together.
You are right of course. I was looking on sotl.as and didn’t spot where the border was in the North West. I guess with an open border it’s an easy mistake to make from a distance!
Good idea… Sounds fair in my opinion.
that might support also elderly ops not being able to spend a lot of time traveling or hiking… and still giving them the chance to activate and have a good feeling by getting some reward.
We all will get older some day
even if we ignore it now…
Sorry you are feeling disgruntled. Well, the TRUTH is that the World isn’t FAIR. Why should a tennis court be a certain size? If it were bigger I could serve more aces.
SOTA has many arbitrary rules. I have concerns over how some decisions are made and have said so but that’s the way SOTA operates. It’s clearly spelt out in the Rules.
BTW SOTA points bands are not completely arbitrarily defined. There is some logic involved.
If SOTA does not fit your needs there are other programs like POTA, IOTA, SiOTA, HEMA, WWFF that you might like better.
The rules of SOTA are not (quite) set in stone. They are subject to occasional revision and input from participants is taken into consideration. Any suggested significant changes are subjected to intense discussion and analysis to see how they would influence the balance of SOTA. An example of a revision that came from participants suggestions is the summer bonus for hotter Associations with no significant winter snow and ice.
The suggestion of an incentive extra point for a tough climb opens a can of worms. Should such an incentive apply to all summits rather than just single point summits, and should the incentive be withdrawn in drought conditions or if a good access (such as for a wind farm) is engineered? Who should be responsible for monitoring the access conditions? Should bogland be regarded as a fragile ecosystem and the incentive avoided to discourage unnecessary wear and tear? One thing I can say right away with a high degree of certainty is that no incentive would be offered to chasers - they are not the ones struggling through peat hags!
I don’t remember seeing an email about this, but I can say that one consideration that the MT would carefully weigh is if we really want the traffic on the lower summits increased tenfold. We describe SOTA as a low impact pursuit with a high degree of environmental consciousness. The lower summits are more likely to be developed for agriculture etc and increased traffic would be more visible. As SOTA is currently organised the idea is to spread the activators efforts around rather than allowing it to become concentrated. Would the benefits of such a change outweigh the disadvantages. The MT should be conservative in considering changes in case of unanticipated consequences.
In terms of “something to aim for” for those living in the flat lands…i have often thought that it would be good to track the number of points an activator has given to chasers. That is, how many points have chasers earned from an individual’s activations.
This would provide something, in addition to S2S, to aim for, and provide some recognition for those who work lots of stations.
But I do not think that there would be a general overload on the lower summits, if you change something here.
I, too, would find it a fair compensation if summits with lower point ratings were allowed to be validly activated several times a year. Actvators like e.g. Chris DL1CR would be appreciated with that.
The most glaring case of difference I always notice when I look at the map showing the transition from FL/VO (where not even the 150m rule applies) to F/JU.
There are of course other incentives, as is the case in HB9. (lowland summit award)
Maybe it would be a help and an incentive, if the activated summit would be counted always at s2s and not only at the first activation in the year.
The discussion here is really only about the points to reach the MG status.
When I look at the value of e.g. Chris @DL1CR or Guru @EA2IF (both no MG status yet) for this community, I think how little the MG status is actually worth in comparison.
This sort of thing has been proposed in the past, and always rejected.
Both in terms of activator safety, and environmental impact, we prefer to avoid elements by which you can continue to build up scoring credit the longer you stay on an activation. We recognise that the S2S aspect of the scheme perhaps contradicts that view, and indeed some MT did not fully support the introduction of the S2S award for that reason.
I’m not sure how this could be defined anyway. Would it be in terms of existing registered chasers who have logged the (matching) QSO? What about registered chasers who have not yet logged the QSO? So maybe it should be generated from the activator log then - but then it brings in the issue of callsigns that are not registered chasers. Some of those may become chasers of the future of course, but some won’t. Some of those could be recently upgraded callsigns - so in fact are registered chasers - but unknown (as yet) to the SOTA Database.
So maybe the algorithm should not concern itself with whether a worked station is a chaser or not and simply multiply the number of stations worked in an activation by the summit points to calculate the points given away. But then you have people like me who combine VHF contesting with SOTA activating, and regularly has activations with QSO numbers into the hundreds, the vast majority of which are with people who will never be SOTA chasers - but you never know…
Do not see any criticism, but is that why you have activated 62 summits in FL/VO and not a single one in F/JU ?
As I understand you !
Here in F/CR (300 summits) you have to go above 2000m to get 8 points, there are only 2 summits at this altitude F/CR-002 (1 activation) and F/CR-003 (0 activation) [103 activations for FL/VO-001]
It took me a long time to accept the SOTA regulation regarding the differences between countries and between associations.
When we understand these all is well in the best of all possible worlds.
I will never be MG … Unless I take a little tour every year in FL/VO which is a very cosmopolitan region in terms of SOTA, if you know what I mean
As I understand you !
