Hello SOTA Community and the Management Team,
I am writing to bring your attention to the severe, years-long stagnation of the HL (South Korea) Association and to urgently request a path forward for its revival.
As many activating and chasing peers know, the HL association data has not seen any regular updates since 2013. The complete lack of local management led to critical errors; for instance, 7 summits were mistakenly located in the West Sea due to outdated initial coordinates. Because the local RM did nothing, the SOTA Headquarters had to directly intervene and deactivate those 7 ghost summits on December 16, 2023. Even after that direct intervention, nothing has changed.
To understand why this is happening, I recently investigated the current RM, Jason (HL4ZFA). I discovered shocking evidence showing his willful neglect of duty and disregard for the community.
In an official public post he made to the Korean amateur radio community back on February 22, 2018, he openly admitted in his own comment that he had deliberately suspended issuing SOTA awards, certificates, and trophies to Korean users. This was done as a form of personal protest against the South Korean government’s amateur radio licensing regulations.
It is completely unacceptable for a Regional Manager to hold the SOTA program and its innocent users hostage over local political or regulatory frustrations. For nearly a decade, the HL association has been completely neglected and ghosted by its own manager due to this attitude.
Currently, I serve as the POTA (Parks on the Air) Country Manager for South Korea, managing over 1,800 parks with a co-manager. Using this experience, I spent several months thoroughly auditing the HL SOTA data against modern digital mapping to fix the numerous coordinate errors present since 2010.
Unfortunately, despite submitting these fully corrected data sheets to the current RM, the process is delayed indefinitely due to his chronic, intentional inactivity. It breaks my heart to see foreign activators visiting South Korea, only to face outdated, broken SOTA data.
I am fully prepared to volunteer my time, effort, and complete digital data to revitalize the HL Association. Because the current RM has long abandoned his duties and harmed the community, I officially request the SOTA Management Team to remove Jason (HL4ZFA) and appoint me as the new Regional Manager (or Co-Regional Manager) for HL, so we can finally implement these long-overdue updates.
I look forward to hearing the Management Team’s guidance on how we can save the HL Association from this decade-long silence.
73,
Jiho Kim / DS5SQS
