Posting alerts for new summits

Activation Reports Pre-Planning
1

Hi all,
9N (Nepal) does not have a SOTA association and there are no summits for it in the database, despite 9N having the most famous summit(s) on the planet!

Since it is a rare country I imagine people would still be interested in getting alerts. What is the proper way to post alerts on SOTAwatch when operating from summits here? Use a blank/000 summit reference?

2

You are right there are no Nepalese summits in the database. You can only post alerts for summits in the database as they will have been checked to ensure they meet the requirements for prominence. Sorry but that means you cannot alert for any Nepal summits as they are not (yet) in the system.

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3

Thanks. What’s the best way to notify people when I will be on the air?

4

You may not use anything in the SOTA system, You will have to look elsewhere.

5

Have a look at GMA. You can activate any summit over 100m.

Also, perhaps the summit comes under the POTA or WWFF schemes.

As far as I know it is much easier to add summits to these schemes than it is to SOTA.

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6

Thanks, will do.

I looked at the SOTA summit criteria. A prominence of +150m is a very low bar for Nepal. Here, +1000m is considered a hill, or even just a hillside! A strenuous day hike here will see you making a climb of 1500m or more.

If you attempt to catalogue every Nepalese land feature with a prominence of +150m, you will be busy for several lifetimes.

I was recently operating from 4000m ASL, and that was only halfway up the hill… it was the end of the day and I was on my way DOWN when I found a tree placed just right for hanging an antenna.

For SOTA purposes, it is probably enough to take every summit feature in Nepal that is listed on OpenStreetMap.

For example, this is a good SOTA peak:

It’s only 2500m ASL so there is infrastructure at the top (a temple and a tea house, which operates as a guest house during high season), but it’s far away enough from the town that there is no QRM and far enough from the really big summits that they don’t block your signal.

7

A VK ham was active in mapping Nepal a few years back and we have reasonable government mapping that means we can start surveying once the georeferencing is completed and checked.

OpenStreetMap is not sufficient for SOTA purposes.

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8

Anytime you want a VK contact and you are on Mt Everest send me a PM and I’ll be looking for you. :smile:

Actually if you are on any peak over 15,000 ft I’ll be happy to give you a contact.

Yes of course I understand it’s not SOTA. - just for bragging rights.

73
Ron
VK3AFW.

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