Hello,
according to the announcement of this new award (as shown in a past release of Sota News), the S2S Award would start since Friday 1st of February.
There was two open points in the draft of the Rules (see below numbers 6 & 7).
Hope the MT can update the general SOTA web page with this new award and complete the open points.
Just in case, I add here below the already announced award.
Best regards 73
Ignacio EA2BD
Summit to Summit Award
This award is being introduced to recognize what many Activators regard as the pinnacle of their activating expeditions where they complete a contact with another activator on a qualifying SOTA summit. We have taken into consideration the existing award that has been available from elsewhere for some considerable time which rewards unique summit to summit contacts and do not plan to compete with that award it would be both pointless and also not in the true spirit of amateur radio.
The new SOTA S2S award builds on our existing structure and rules and can be integrated into the database without any great difficulty. It must be noted that there has not been a system for recording S2S contacts within the database (although some activators have used the comment field for this purpose with no common structure to their records) and to do a cross check between activator records to locate summit to summit contacts would put an unwarranted strain upon the database servers. Consequently we will introduce the new award from 1 February 2013 for new S2S contacts only; it will not be retrospective both for fairness to all but also for technical reasons with administration of the database.
How will points accumulate? This has been the subject of much discussion but the rules will be as follows:
- The award will be scored by taking the sum of the points value of the activated summit and the chased summit
- The rules for activators will apply to the activated summit score i.e. the summit may be scored only once per calendar year. If subsequent activations take place from the same summit in the calendar year only the chased summit score will count for the award
- Only the points value of the activated summit will be counted, summer or winter bonuses will not be included as they are already used for activator awards.
- The rules for chasers will apply to the chased summit i.e. the summit may only be counted for the award once per day.
- Commencement date 1 February 2013 to allow for modifications to the database to collect the relevant information. S2S prior to this date will not be counted
- The database will be revised so that summit to summit contacts can be indicated (a tick box probably)
- Award qualifying points values will be announced prior to commencement of the award, this is still under discussion
Because there will be some (minor) changes to the database Andy will liaise, on request, with those individuals that use information from the database for their own software to ensure they can keep their services operational once the changes are introduced.