Agreed. Here in VK and I suspect many other places there are few “band tuners” during the week. If someone has alerted and I know they are reliable I’ll try to spend 10 minutes listening out for them - other activities permitting. Week day activators know the value of spots. Some peaks have no phone coverage so the first “by chance” caller if a known SOTA chaser is asked to spot. This will usually bring up the requisite number of callers.
Any phone that can send an SMS can be used to spot and is a worthwhile safety device to have when out in the hills. SMS works at low signal levels but if you have no coverage at all then you are reliant on your radio.
There are popular calling frequencies. 14.310 USB is probably the most popular for 20 m in this region with 14.062 CW for CW buffs. LSB on 7.090 +/- 5 kHz increments and CW on 7.032 ares also very popular.
Calling blind on these is a better option than picking any old clear frequency.
While the above is true for VK/ZL something similar would apply elsewhere I guess.
We all still get failed activation’s. My last one in 2015 resulted in 3 contacts. I did not spot but had alerted.
So reconsider your strategy and have another try is my advice to all. Propagation is down and for QRP and not so great antennas we need to create as many possibilities of success as we can.
Spotting helps the chasers, not just the activators.
Yeah, that 7.090 thing. I don’t even try to listen for y’all there, because in the US we can’t use phone below 7.125. Even that is for Amateur Extra licensees. The rest have to stay above 7.175. If I could hear you, it would just make me sad.
This is getting off topic I realise. Standby we will return. Our bands have in the past been narrower than yours with 40 m being only 100 kHz then 150 kHz. When it expanded to 300 kHz we had a lot of SW broadcasters in the top 100 kHz and some in the 150 - 200 kHz bit. Hence a lot of SSB activity has remained concentrated below 7.150. It’s hard (impossible) to get anyone to move.
I do operate above 7.200 from home but it’s not a popular region because of the concern over residual bscst interference.
20 and 30 m bands are our best bet for dx now. 40 improves in the dark hours but few of us want to be on a summit then. During the last sunspot peak I worked S2S into Eu on 5 W SSB and CW but struggle to get out of my backyard now.
So it’s a matter of concentrating on the frequencies that are proven providers in the time 2200 to 0700 UTC (our daylight period) - and spotting…we are back on topic.
Spotting is not essential. Ignore the SOTA aspect for a moment and think instead about how to make 4 contacts in the time that you are on the summit. The contacts don’t have to be people participating in SOTA.
There is a limit to how long you can sit tuning a band hoping to hear an alerted station (or sometimes an unalerted station) pop up out of the noise! At busy times I sometimes use the dual watch feature on my rig to monitor two popular frequencies while I busy myself with something else, but after a while the metronomic changes in the noise gets on my nerves and I have to stop. On a couple of occasions I used dual watch on two rigs but it didn’t take long for that to start driving me crackers!
I can’t speak for CW, I don’t play that game, but 14.285 and 7.118 are popular here. If conditions on 40 are poor I monitor 5.3985 USB.
We need some sort of protocol to deal with that problem. I would suggest a self-spot for 7.090 with a note “listening on 7.178” or some other frequency in the General phone sub-band. I know this could work because I have worked American contest stations on 40 that have been announcing something like “listening on 7.090”. Trouble is that when 40 is good it is a babel of stations three deep in many languages, but it would possibly work better on 20.
Dear all:
Thanks for your many replies! Please do not misunderstand me - I totally agree that there is a trade-off between “fair means” and success rate / fun in the activity/family duties etc.
If we do not want to be smartphone addicts that coordinate contest-style minimal QSOs entirely on the basis of Web applications, we need, IMO, an alternative path for relaying spot information.
I see at least three options:
APRS on VHF
You could easily add frequency and mode information to the comment field of an APRS message and start sending this once on the summit, entirely by fair ham radio means. We might need an APRS spotter service that extracts such info from aprs.fi and posts spots.
Pro: Simple, established grid of gateways and digipeaters
Con: VHF coverage - I am unsure how well APRS works in the inner Alps and other rather remote areas, despite the elevated position. But maybe others can share their experience with APRS on SOTA activations.
APRS of HF
This is specified (HF APRS Notes), but my feeling is that there is no wide use of this. We also have the problem that a single-frequency protocol like APRS does not work well on HF due to the long-range propagation and lower reliability of the raw channel. After all, the APRS modulation is simple 300/1200 bps AFSK modulation.
New PSK31-based protocol
This is my favorite: It will be easy to craft a protocol for sending spot information as PSK31 message, and they will have a great range - if your SSB can be heard, your PSK31 can be received a hundred times.
We would only need a relatively modest net of PSK31 skimmers that monitor either the commonly agreed PSK31 frequencies on 40 and 20 meters or the entire phone portion of those bands. The latter would be useful for sending the short PSK31 spot information on the very same frequency you plan to use for SSB.
This third option would give us much better means to choose our frequency or even band on the summit depending on actual conditions - after all, what do you do if your alert said you will be on 7.118 ± and the band is full of QRM there.
Ideally, we would combine #1 and #3 and use the very same syntax for both the PSK31 spot information message and the APRS comment field, so we would have two independent transport layers for the same purpose. In areas with good APRS coverage, simply enter the comment field into your APRS device, and in more remote areas, use a tablet or stand-alone device to send the PSK31 message.
The way I look at this Martin is that SOTA is a two way process. It is not purely activating, it is chasing as well. I regard it very worthwhile when activating to try to work as many SOTA chasers as possible. To facilitate this, I wholly embrace the alerting and spotting system and always try to be on the bands as close to my alerted time as possible. This has stood me in good stead and in over 500 activations, the “difficult” ones where I have struggled to qualify the summit number only a few. I have never failed to qualify a summit in almost 10 years on SOTA.
I do not feel that the existence of the alerting / spotting system diminishes the value of an activation in any way. After all there is enough of a challenge in getting up to the summits, setting up the equipment and enduring what can often be a harsh environment.
Hi Gerald,
thanks - I am not challenging the idea of alerts and spotting infrastructure per se. What I feel uncomfortable with is using a smartphone app with Internet connectivity on the summit to coordinate a short ham radio exchange. APRS2SOTA is in the right direction.
But all of this is clearly a matter of personal preferences.
I never tried to spot from a summit.
Alerting works fine if you give correct time and QRG !
There may be problems for QSOs from the summit if you are late
and there is a contest running. Perhaps work some contesters then ?
You also might give a phone call to a friendly chaser when you are on/close
to the summit. On some summits there is no access to internet.
But it is impossible to work from summits without informations
distributed to others by chasers or DXcluster users.
If you run CW you have no choice - you will be automatically spotted by the RBNGate Robot (unless you don’t post an alert). So self-spotting, somehow “balances the playing field” for SSB operators as RBNGate doesn’t work on SSB signals. That said CW Ops also self-spot at times.
You don’t have to self spot and when I was living and activating in Australia, often I would not need to - I would simply call CQ SOTA on 7090 or 14285KHz and I would get contacts - one of whom would spot me.
As you have found, in Germany, calling on an expected frequency is often not possible as some Italian or Russian (or other nationality) station is often sitting on the common QRP frequencies chatting with his mate down the road, both running QRO power levels that are not even allowed in Germany. So one has to search for a clear (often at an odd part of a band) frequency that is free (at least it’s free until you have finished your CQ call on it). To inform the chasers that you are on a wierd frequency, I think self spotting is the only option.
I see you said it took two activations to get the required 4 contacts for the summit points. I’m not sure if this is correct. As the activations were on two different days, I think they stand alone. It’s not like the WWFF rules where you can accumulate the required 44(!) contacts over multiple activations.
APRS could be an option. On VHF it should work from an APRS equipped 2m HT from some summits. I know HF APRS exists but I don’t know of anyone using it from a SOTA summit, most use a smart phone or SMS using a handy.
I see you are not located too far from me (I live near to Landsberg am Lech) if you want to do a joint activation sometime, let me know. (Naturlisch, mann spricht Deutsch auch, trotz meine Englische nationalität).
I was unclear: I was on the summit twice, made 1 contact 2m-SSB the first time and 5 on 40m-SSB the second time. The first attempt was no successful activation, the second was, independently of the first try.
As for CW: I am fine with the RBNFate Robot and actually think it is very useful. Maybe my subject header for this thread was misleading - I have no problem with online means to coordinate and facilitate SOTA QSOs. But I do not want to use a Smartphone app on the summit to initiate a few contest-style QSOs, because I could then also do Summits-on-Twitter, Summits-on-Facebook, etc.
APRS, be it VHF or HF and CW skimming is perfectly fine with my – beginner’s – understanding if the hobby.
Martin, DK3IT
PS: Will send you a private message re activations.
it is also possible to self-spot yourself via SMS … so you do not need an internet connection or smartphone on your activations. here is a description of “how-to” spot yourself via SMS:
i also used APRS2SOTA a few times, works also very good (when there is an i-gate in the area).
Hi Martin (OE5REO), I believe Martin (DK3IT) doesn’t wish to use a Smart Phone on an activation, so while Android apps such as SOTA Spotter and Rucksack Radio Tool are, as well as a way to spot oneself, also a way to see who else is out on a summit, that you might get a Summit to Summit (S2S) contact with, Martin prefers not to use a Smart Phone. I had also suggested the point regarding using SMS which of course will work from the simpler “just” mobile Phone (aka “Handy” in German speaking areas of course).
Martin (5REO) when you used APRS was that on 2m or HF?
As Martin (3IT) is just getting into SOTA, we should warn him that it becomes adictive!
I look forward to receiving your PM to discuss a possible joint activation Martin (3IT), either over this reflector - just click on my callsign/avatar and you will get a “message” button, or via email (my address on qrz.com is correct).
APRS uses internet based linking extensively nowadays. I’d be very surprised if any APRS messages from central Europe could get to the APRS2SOTA server in the UK without using APRS-IS somewhere. CW skimmers also use internet linking to report what they are hearing, but they are, in reality, no different to normal chasers. Chasers and skimmers listen to radio and spot what they hear, one automatically and one manually.
If you are taking a purist view of using RF not internet linking etc., which is how I read your comments, then you should probably avoid using APRS.
Please do not misunderstand me; I do not take a purist view, at least not strictly. I just think that standing on the top of a mountain and scheduling a short QSO by a smartphone app is a bit too extreme for my taste. I mean, often people ask us why we erect large antennas as if we did not know there was the Internet and Fast DSL available, and then we talk of command of technology, skills, understanding, ham radio in emergency situations, etc.
Personally, I have learned from this thread that I will
continue to work on my CW skills until I will feel confident enough to handle a SOTA activation CW-only and master a moderate pile-up,
buy a Yaesu VX-8DE HT, build my own GPS module for it, and try to use the two available APRS2SOTA servers,
work on a PSK31-based alternative; maybe it will be as simple as fetching PSK31 spots from the Telnet services of revearsebeacon.net (if they contain the raw CQ message); if not, revearsebeacon.net can at least tell the frequencies to check.
Amateurs have been arranging QSOs by phone/networking since time began Martin and certainly a long, long time before mobile phones were about. If you weren’t a member of a phone based spotting network, you could miss all the small openings on VHF etc.
It still strikes me that there’s no difference between sending an SMS via RF to the nearest cellular base station from where it’s routed over wired network to the SMS server and SOTAwatch. Or from a handheld to the nearest APRS RF gateway and thence by internet to the APRS server and SOTAwatch. Half a dozen of one and six of the other.
Before you spend serious cash on a VX8, you may want to consider using APRSdroid on a phone. You use the phone not as a phone but as a small portable terminal. You can use the built in GPS and use the program to generate and decode normal 1200bps AFSK packet tones. Connect the earphone/mic socket of the phone to your radio and you have a portable APRS system for a fraction of the cost. You don’t even need to have a SIM card or a cellular connection for it to work.
Likewise, just learn morse code and the activator will be automatically spotted provided an alert has been put up which should always be done.
Saves messing around with APRS or PSK31 which are modes not in common use by SOTA.
For those in the northern part of the world there are a lot more RBN skimmers about than here in VK land. I do not often get spotted by a local skimmer here in Australia.
For my part I have no problem with self spotting if there is mobile phone access. Saves time for both activator and chaser when doing multiple activations in one day.
Actually, this can be disabled in the comments field of an alert. I’ll leave it as an RTFM exercise for people to work out how (30 seconds searching the reflector should find it!)
