Hello to all,
After uploading the log of an activation I look at which stations have chased me. There is almost always some callsign that I have not worked. However when I look at its log the program has added the points without doing the qso. Now I ask: Do the logs of shack sloths ever cross those of mountain goats?
TNX in advance.
73 José
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I am also always fascinated with who I have had a qso with. 
To my knowledge, there is no matching or comparison here.
Sometimes it would be desirable.
But on the other hand:
Imagine you activate a summit and laboriously create your 4 contacts and the chasers do not enter them into the database and the activation does not become valid. Also stupid.
If you want, you can write to the chaser and ask him to delete his entry. 
73 Armin
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Hi Jose,
In the past ghost QSO’s seemed to be very rare. These days, I have noticed in a few logs, where I have logged 50+ CW stations as activator, there may be one ghost.
As far as I can see both the activator and chaser database logs are stand alone, handshaking from activator to chaser logs is not called into play. Perhaps Andy can confirm the inner workings of the database.
I put it down to busy bands where a station thinks they have worked “old cloth ears” when in fact the QSO was underway with another station. Additionally, I have spotted logging errors due to forgotten daylight saving or miss read clock. These errors are not always easy to spot but may account for the ghost QSO.
Regards
David
G0EVV
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It’s quite simple really… It’s almost always poor operating rather than cheating.
There is very little blatant cheating.
Since SOTA started only 1 person has been excluded from the program for cheating. We, the MT, didn’t believe he was physically capable of the activations he claimed. He never alerted, there was never any photographic proof he was at the summit unless you could drive into the AZ. He always posted pictures of his car in the trailhead car park, we knew him as Mr. CPOTA (car parks on the air). We allowed all his claims to stand but eventually insisted on photographic evidence he was at the summit for all future activations. He did one more activation and provided evidence even though it was a drive on. Then said he didn’t think it was fair he had to prove he wasn’t cheating and said he was going to continue activating but not enter the data. Draw your own conclusions from that. The one we drew was he would continue to abuse the chasers by claiming to be on a summit when he wasn’t so we modified the DB code to exclude his call (and the club calls he tried to use) so that people were not able to claim chase points for what we believed were invalid activations.
So just one exclusion in 19.75 years.
Your SOTA peers will complain to the MT if they hear you regularly claiming QSOs that you weren’t having. Last time was a few months back. We, the MT, had a word in the chaser’s ear about claiming QSOs he hadn’t had. This case was just poor operating standards not deliberate cheating.
We can match chaser logs vs activator logs if something “smells bad” about the logs. There is very little need to do so however.
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Thanks for the answers.
73
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