Just caught this on the south gate news.
Possible they could get hooked Sota-ing in the Himalayas.
PS does this me possible double points as summits so high its unreal 
Interesting read I have to admit
Karl
Well, it’s set up as an automated safety feature, so nothing at all like conducting SOTA activations from the summits Karl. First, the association(s) would have to be set up anyway. You never know, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Double points? Of course not 
This is a completely bogus use of amateur radio. They need hand held transceivers and some beacon units. They should be using commercial frequencies for such an exploit and not stealing amateur frequencies because they don’t need to follow other regulations.
As for first licence issued to a mountaineer, do they mean Indian mountaineer because I think there are quite a few proper mountaineers with licences already.
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Interesting.
Leads me to a question has any one been up to these places yet and operated on the ham bands as yet.
But whom knows what future holds may be in our life time, we may hear CQ Sota from the tip of Everest or its surrounding peaks. Now that would be well cool would it not.
karl
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Sorry, Karl, but the first epithet that comes to mind is “stupid” rather than “cool”! I think the death toll on Everest in the past week has been three. Summiting Everest is a feat of endurance beyond most of us. Even with the fixed ropes and ladders that the Sherpas install at the start of each season, young, fit and skilled mountaineers regularly die up there. You need to carry oxygen rather than ham gear!
Watching some of the films about Everest (well, a guy can dream, can’t he?) VHF handies often figure in the communications, though what license (if any) is never mentioned! A 2 metre SOTA is not impossible, but I doubt that the extra gear for HF is practical, and operating it through a triple layer of gloves would take practice!
Brian
Perhaps a little strong Brian? 
As you say we all like to dream and lots of things that might once have been regarded as stupid have now been achieved (or even become common place).
Indeed. To be fair, Karl used the phrase “in our lifetime”. Now that metric will be varied among the SOTA community, but I for one hope to have another decent 45 years on top of the 45 years I’ve already had. When one thinks of the exponential technological advances in that last 45 years, you cannot rule out the possibility of safe passage to Everest’s summit and ability to efficiently and safely make amateur radio transmissions - between now and 2061.
It seems unimaginable of course. But then so many things we take for granted now will have been unimaginable - and indeed unimagined - at the start of the 1970s.
In my life time
I have seen a lot of things
First man in space
Men on the moon
The internet
Things happening now you would not thought possible 30 years ago and the times man has said can’t do that due to what ever and now here we are doing it.
Boundaries are being stretched all the time.
Am pushing 57 and whom knows what my life time might see, let alone bring 
BUT end of day hell of a take off point from up there for sure won’t need a big antenna a simple loop would do or small antenna. look on how Sota activators have lightened there loads from first started as in battery technology, lighter smaller more power out put. Sizes of TX’s see a FT-817 my god not know they that small.
May be bit on impossible side today
But who knows what Tomorrow will bring.
Be great to work a activator on top of the highest summit in world.
Dream, yep certainly so.
Don’t think I be going up there me self thou.
Karl
There was a time when I dreamed of going there myself, even if it was only to Base Camp to look up. Other things got in the way and it never happened, but I went into the logistics and the difficulties quite extensively.
Do you know that the mortality rate amongst fit experienced climbers on Everest is 6.5%? In 2014, seventeen Sherpas died on the mountain. On the final approach to the summit, the first guy to do it without using oxygen (Reinhold Messner) was taking ten breaths for every step, and stopping to rest every ten steps. One guy I spoke to who got to the top said that he could only stay for three minutes, the cold and the tearing wind drove him back down after a batch of photos - and he had an electrically heated suit and gloves.
Technology has made it marginally possible, but it is still a lot more dangerous than, say, the front line in Afghanistan during the war! To make it easier to get there a new generation of helicopters might waft you to the summit, they might build a cable car, even a mountain railway, but conditions at the top, battered by the jet stream, will still be pretty nasty. I called it “stupid” because even without a radio you are facing odds that are not enticing even for the most daring of us - you would have to be driven to accept a one in fifteen chance of coming down in a body bag - eventually (there is no hurry to retrieve corpses!)
Brian
I think Brian Blessed was the most impressive of all to attempt it.
He dressed up as an explorer, with no aided oxygen. The man is a total beast !
As Brian has mentioned forget radio, the chances of even staying up there to make contacts are so slim you would be risking your own life in doing so. Especially for a HF styled activation, no way.
Imagine the anger you would experience if someone deliberately QRM’ed you, or if you had some total LID of a chaser on the other end…
He wouldn’t need a radio to make himself heard, either 
I think of Ranulph Fiennes, reaching the summit at age 65, having had a heart bypass a few years earlier.
Not something I would want to attempt, but it puts the normal trials of life in perspective!
Adrian
G4AZS
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So, on a related note… what is the highest altitude of an activation so far? This doesn’t seem to be something you can easily ask the database (though it would be easy for the DBA to find out…) but I do see that Mont Blanc has been done a couple of times (and on HF, to boot). Any 5000m+ peaks, though?
You can download a complete list of summits from the Database that has details of the last activation in one of the columns. So you could sort it by Alt. (descending) and find the one nearest the top of the list that has an activation recorded.
You’d probably need a CSV editor to handle it as there are more than 65536 summits in SOTA - unless you have a relatively new PC and recent version of Office.
Mont Blanc compared to Everest is different. The latter being much colder, which is one of the most challenging aspects of the climb, and one that kills most people combined with small lungs
To climb everest you must either be totally fixated on the achievement so far as not caring whether you die in the process, or you accept the risk and hope to live.
Some grim stories are written about climbers dying on Everest, Its not a pleasant subject.
Highest 20 activations so far:
F/AB-001 Mont Blanc 4807 F/SQ9MDF 2009-08-13
I/PM-419 Punta Gnifetti 4554 I1URL/1 2015-07-26
W6/SN-001 Mount Whitney 4418 KB1WDW 2015-10-28
W7W/RS-001 Mt Rainier 4392 W1DMH/7 2014-05-22
W0C/SR-001 Mount Elbert 4391 WS0TA 2011-07-21
W0C/SR-058 Mount Massive 4387 KI6YMZ 2014-08-03
W6/SN-002 Mount Williamson 4382 KJ6HOT 2014-07-05
W0C/SP-001 La Plata Peak 4361 WS0TA 2013-08-02
W0C/RG-001 Uncompahgre Peak 4353 KX0R 2013-09-05
W0C/FR-001 Mount Lincoln 4346 WA6MM 2014-09-06
W6/CD-001 White Mountain Peak 4342 KJ6HOT 2015-10-12
W0C/FR-002 Grays Peak 4341 AD0KE 2015-10-17
W0C/SR-003 Mount Antero 4341 NM5S 2015-08-02
W0C/PR-013 Torreys Peak 4340 AD0KE 2015-10-17
W0C/PR-014 Quandary Peak 4339 WA6MM 2014-10-18
W0C/FR-003 Mount Evans 4339 KX0R 2015-09-22
W0C/WE-001 Castle Peak 4339 N0BCB 2013-08-04
W0C/FR-110 Longs Peak 4336 N0BCB 2015-08-23
W0C/SR-004 Mount Shavano 4328 KI6YMZ 2012-09-02
W0C/SR-005 Mount Princeton 4319 N0BCB 2014-08-01
Boo. Bad form. Hiss. Spoilsport.
You could have at least gone down as far as 3715m ASL 
Just for Tom as he wasn’t in the top 20… here is number 191.
EA8/TF-001 El Teide 3715 EA4FJX/P 2015-08-29
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Also photographers - no light DSLR cameras but heavy photo equipment (40 lbs), no Sherpas - are pushing the limits of contemporary landscape photography.
Five hours of photographing on the top of Gasherbrum II… I would not have believed that such things could happen - and thus activating Gasherbrum II (8,035 m asl) on HF is practically very imaginable!
http://www.horolezec.cz/index_en.html
73! Karel
Thank you for spelling that out Andy 
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I’m well aware of that. (Amongst other things, Everest is an order of magnitude more expensive to get up!)
Also, it is worth noting that the death rate is not evenly distributed across groups; some organisations have a much lower casualty rate. I’m still not tempted though; I don’t really want to ever describe my leisure activities as “gruelling”.
Thanks for that!
On reflection this doesn’t seem too surprising, given the general dearth of 5000m+ peaks in the world in general and in SOTA in particular… presumably only Alaska has any in the database right now. Hypoxic Goat award, anyone?