The Wainwrights on the Air awards program complements SOTA for activators in the Lake District G/LD region. We are hoping this facility will encourage SOTA activators to log their activations on the WOTA site too.
Here’s the general WOTA blurb for those of you unfamiliar:
Wainwrights On The Air (WOTA for short) is an adventure radio programme for amateur radio enthusiasts who enjoy being out on the fells of the English Lake District, as well as those who just like collecting contacts with unusual locations, and has been designed to make participation possible for everyone…
Similar to Summits On The Air (SOTA), the goal is to make contacts from, or with, as many different summits as possible. All of the 214 fells described by Alfred Wainwright in his famous Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, and all of the 116 fells described in his famous Outlying Fells Of Lakeland, count for contacts, and an award will be made to anyone who contacts or activates all of them! But if you just want to add some radio interest to your walks in the hills, that’s fine too. Taking part in WOTA will add to your fun by increasing the number of people wanting to contact you.
For those SOTA activators who maybe have thought about WOTA but are discouraged from manually entering their contacts in yet another system we have some good news - a new feature has been developed to allow SOTA CSV compatible log files to be uploaded directly. In the most straightforward case if you are activating a SOTA summit which is also a Wainwright then you can upload your SOTA CSV file as-is and will be awarded the appropriate points - this is a two-click ‘upload-check-submit’ process.
The facility has been designed to also recognise WOTA summit references which allows it to detect WOTA S2S contacts automatically. For those who are activating a WOTA summit the ability to specify a WOTA reference allows the same logging software to be used as SOTA in most cases. It handles V1 and V2 SOTA CSV file formats.
I developed this module because I was initially discouraged from logging my exciting high-volume SOTA activations on the WOTA site due to the amount of manual effort required. Now, having logged my activation as normal in Fast Log Entry and exported my SOTA CSV file I can get points for WOTA with a couple of additional clicks.
Doing this also confirms your WOTA-compatible activation for chasers who are active in both the SOTA and WOTA programmes - keeping them doubly happy! By using a convention in the comments section you can also automatically log WOTA-to-WOTA summit contacts without having to edit the CSV file directly. Obviously if you are chasing someone working in G/LD then the facility allows upload of chase contacts as well.
For more information on WOTA please visit http://wota.org.uk. There is a full tutorial on the SOTA CSV import facility on the WOTA discourse server.
Kind regards, Mark. M0NOM