Summit confusion on sotawatch 9/5/2022

Yesterday 9/5/2022 I activated VK2/CT-011.

My earlier intention was to activate VK2/CT001, but when I reached it, the park and summit access were closed to the public by road works. I had not checked whether the normally open park was accessible.

I posted an update to my alert stating that activation was cancelled. I then posted a new alert for Vk2/CT-011, timed at 2 hours later than the original alert. When activating CT011 I self spotted correctly, however spots for CT001 started appearing, posted by RBNHOLE. I continued to self spot for the correct summit.

Sorry for the confusion, I’ve posted an explanation to the Ozsota mailing list but as I worked several European chasers, I wanted to make sure they have the right summit in their log. They are both worth 8 points but it’s best to have the summit reference correct in the chaser log.

I thought RBNHole seemed to be posting more than the usual number of spots, some were within 10 minutes of its own previous spot for the same frequency.

73 and thanks to all the chasers.
Andrew VK1DA/VK2DA

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After some discussion on ozsota I now understand RBNhole better. Some useful learnings:

  1. RBNhole refreshes its set of alerts every 5 minutes, so to really take a cancelled alert out of the picture, it needs to be deleted.
  2. RBNhole matches the on-air callsign with the alerted callsign, including any modifiers like /P. Unless it matches perfectly, you won’t get a spot from rbnhole.

In future I intend to
A. Update the alert to notify the readers of alerts that the activation has changed.
B. Before the first call on the new summit, delete the old alert. This could be a few minutes after A or several hours.
C. Check that the alert specifies /P if that’s what I’m using on air.
D. Check the time directives available for RBNHole to limit its scope if desirable.

Hope this helps others who have puzzled over some RBNhole actions.

73 Andrew VK1DA/VK2DA

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