That requirement has been applied to a few SOTA activators. Of the 3 so required., one provided all the up front proof you could ever need that they had been at the summits in the past and the proof requirement was lifted. Another had no camera and provided a few GPS routes before deciding to give up. Another provided one photo of a drive on before saying they weren’t going to log their activations if they had to prove they were genuine.
All had good activation records but only one could show without doubt they were a genuine activator. The others rapidly dropped out of SOTA when they had to prove they were performing genuine activations. Draw your own conclusions… I know I did!
This is no longer the case. It was some time ago, and could still be asked for in exceptional circumstances, but generally your log is accepted as is, just like SOTA.
Thats useful to know, thanks. I had wonfdered why US activators favoured that upper part of the band for POTA/WWFF. Your chances of finding or reaching VK/ZL above 7.2MHz on 40m are limited by strong chinese-language AM broadcast stations occupying that band. But most 20m park activations are on 14.244 which sounds like it’s in your range. I will certainly continue use that instead of the alternative 14.144 from now on.
Think I have only 3 US WWFF contacts so far from my own activations.
Most of the WWFF areas will be listed on Protected Planet, which has reasonable mapping. You may need to check between other topo maps and the Protected Planet map to double check that your planned operating site is inside the Park/Reserve boundary and thus fulfill the activation zone requirements for both activities.
In VK, I manually prepared an initial list of SOTA sites inside WWFF boundaries in VK3 some years ago. Marc VK3OHM has subsequently prepared such data using GIS software across all of VK.
WWFF has a much stronger following in VK than POTA, but all VKFF areas are now listed on POTA, so you can submit logs for both WWWFF and POTA if you wish.
My thoughts on why VKFF is more popular than SOTA in Australia is the land access problems we have, as a big majority of summits are on private property. Access permission is a big problem or even finding who owns the land is even harder sometimes to ask permission to visit. Parks in Australia are only closed during fire ban days or times during summer for bush fires and a park fee is usually required in national parks to take a motor vehicle to the car park. Conservation Parks are usually free access to the car park. The list of VKFF parks has a park boundary feature which also shows when there is a SOTA summit in the park.
Regards.
vk5cz …
Right now, the SMP is showing the following errors, and has done so for the last few hours:
the main mapping page can show no points for any summit anywhere,
the range page finds no summits within xxxx km/miles of anywhere,
the tracks, activations and chases pages can find no summits at all
Yep - very useful. Print out one of those pages, fold the paper several times, and place under a table leg to stop the table from rocking about. As I said before,
Thank heaven for Google/OpenMaps/[insert_favorite_mapping_app_here] maps, eh? Or, of course, the very fine sotl.as…
That’s not an unmaintained site. The reality is that we all have jobs and priorities, and there’s bigger things I want to fix on other sites first - particularly SOTAData. Both myself and Josh WU7H have pushed fixes to SMP in recent times, mainly sorting out backend sync issues to point at the main DB, not the sync’ed database on the SMP server (which was the cause of the outage yesterday).
Ultimately, SMP will go away as all websites do, but it’s not going to happen in the next year. It’ll be a gradual process of merging functionality into other sites, and watching what happens to usage and adjusting accordingly. SMP has had almost 3000 hits to the index page alone in the past 3 days, so it’s not unused, and certainly well loved. And why wouldn’t it be? It’s a phenomenal site with heaps of functionality. Replacing that must be cautious and take time.
I find the SMP site very useful. I like to look at an area and see which summits are close together for possible multiple activation days. I just wish the drop down offered “Summits not activated by me this year”.
I manually compiled a listing of EA5/AT SOTA summits and the POTA parks that either contain them or at least part of the SOTA activation zone is inside the POTA park (see below).
Of 102 valid @SOTA summits in EA5/AT, at least part of the activation zone of 54 of them is inside the area of a @POTA park; 17 of them are simultaneously inside two POTA parks.
