SOTAwatch Twitter feed closed down

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Back in 2009, I set up a gateway to send SOTAwatch spots to the Twitter account @SOTAwatch. It appears that the feed stopped working on 23rd May, and I am afraid that I have only just noticed.

The reason it has failed is that Twitter has withdrawn the API that it was using. Now I’ve no doubt that with sufficient effort I could migrate to the v2 API. But the new API brings with it some new restrictions - in particular the rate limit on tweets for a free account is an order of magnitude too small to support the current rate of spots. It would cost $100 per month to buy enough capacity.

The original motivation for writing the gateway was to get spots sent as SMS messages, which at the time was a free service from Twitter. This facility is long gone. Nobody seems to have noticed the latest outage. I think it no longer serves any purpose.

I have been running the service on servers at my former workplace. But I retired in 2020, and whilst I am still accredited to my former department as a visitor, I can’t rely on being able to use their resources indefinitely. So shutting down the gateway seems the right thing to do.

Over its life the gateway has sent out over a million tweets. I hope it has been useful.

Does anybody (especially anybody in the MT) want to take over the @SOTAwatch Twitter account for any related purpose? If not, I intend to deactivate the account.

Martyn M1MAJ

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Thanks for the info.

I could imagine status updates (on outtages or news) related to SOTAwatch and its systems could be of interest to use the channel?
The new of feeds would be small.

In generel there are other systems that work very well like APRS or the pushnotifications in SOTAspotter, SOTAGoat and Hamalert.
Hamalert btw has a SMS feature if someone is looking for that.

73 Joe

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While not Twitter: mastodon and lemmy.radio are great places to share now. Specifically SOTA - Lemmy.Radio is open for you

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Thanks for running this service! It was very useful to me while I was active on that platform, and I appreciate your efforts!

Michael, N4DCW

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Hi Martin,

Seems silly to let it just be deactivated. PM me and I’ll be happy to help the MT take it over. As for what we use it for going forward? Well, that’s something for people to suggest. At the rate things are going, it might be made irrelevant by Elon soon anyway :smiley:

Thanks for running the service all these years!

Cheers,
Andrew

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I’m a twitter user and I was never aware of the account and its purpose. Seems a shame to give it up though.

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I used it predominantly to double-check Callsign & Summit Ref for S2S contacts before csv upload.

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