Spot Error 28/06/25 G/SP-009

Activation Reports Issues/Errors
1

Hi all,

I activated Hail Storm Hill (G/SP-009) today. I spotted that I was QRT around 12:10z however the RBN picked me up and spotted me when I was doing a POTA later in the day.

So, if you worked me after 12:10z it was not on the SOTA summit.

73,
Luke

2

You need to manage your alerts properly to stop this happening. As far as RBNHole is concerned, an alert is active from 1 hour before until 3 hours after the time. If you call CQ at any time during this period, it will generate a SOTA spot*. So, to prevent incorrect spots being generated if you are doing a POTA activation later, you could:

  1. Change the alert validity period by adding, for example, S+2 to the alert comment. This means the alert will be active for only 2 hours, instead of the default 3.
  2. Use a different callsign for POTA. For example, use M7OPK/P for SOTA and M7OPK for POTA.
  3. Delete your SOTA alert before your POTA activation. It can take 10 minutes for changes in alerts to be picked up by RBNHole so do it early.

* A CQ will generate a new spot if the last spot was at least 10 minutes ago, or the frequency is at least 1kHz different.

2 Likes
3

Cheers Richard, this is very helpful. I didn’t realise how the RBN really worked and related to the different alerts on sites like sotawatch/sotlas and pota site.

Hopefully I’ll manage to avoid this mix up in future :slight_smile:

4

The RBN doesn’t generate any spots. RBNHole takes a feed from the RBN and compares it with the SOTA alerts to generate SOTA spots. Presumably POTA (and WWFF, BOTA, etc etc) have their own systems to do something similar, but they will all work in their own way.

1 Like