Of course, there is something “sporty” about doing so many summits in one day.
But the number also depends on many factors. How close are the mountains?
It’s probably easier if you don’t have to walk much and can make your 4 QSOs with the chaser community waiting for you in less than 2 minutes on 2m FM.
It’s different if you have to walk over a km/ over 150 metres of altitude per summit and then set up your equipment and antenna for HF.
I only do HF … and I often do 2 to 3 summits a day. I have also done 4 to 5 on long days.
I could probably do 7 or 8 on very long days in summer in my area, but I don’t think I could enjoy it then. The fun factor would be very limited.
My case was 4 without vehicle movement in a path. It took 11 hours and 11km.
1 Mt Harunafuji 18QSO
2 Mt Eboshigatake 10QSO
3 Mt Bingushiyama 15QSO
4 Mt Kamondake 12QSO
all HF operation
I’ve gone to work just about every Mon-Fri since Mar 16th 2020. Work is now in the kitchen where I sit with the laptop and try not eat toast with every cup of tea. But the works laptop is connected to the works VPN and so the firewall at the VPN stops me accessing the SOTA servers directly.
clearly bogus entries for one activator (28 summits on one day with one contact per activation)
two activation “marathons” perfomed by the same 4 chasers/activators in 2007 (23 and 24 activations),
the highest number of activations in one day was 15 back in 2007.
In 2016, the maximum was 10.
In 2017, the maximum was 9.
In 2018, the maximum was 11.
In 2019, the maximum was 10.
In 2020, the maximum was 11.
In 2021, the maximum was 10.
So about 10 seems to be the best you can do for “normal” activations in the regions with a very high density of easily accessible summts.
Indeed… still unverified, but thought not to be “in the spirit of SOTA” when you take your chasers with you. Thankfully no-one else has tried to repeat this, which does not surprise me given the furore at the time.
The 28 in one day is a spreadsheet being helpful error. The summitref was entered in one line and the QSO details entered. Then instead of copying the entry for the summitref to the lines below, the data was copied and the spreadsheet updated the summit ref on each subsequent line. So line 1 was was WS-001, line 2 was WS-002, line 3 was WS-003 etc. and each line was treated as a separate activation. I’ll mail the activator so he can fix it. 28 QSOs resulted in 28 1 QSO activations.
Hi guys, thanks for all answers. You are great! The question was originated by pure curiosity over here, but now we do plan to try as many activations as possible in a single day. It will be very funny!
And sorry for my delayed answer. We are working in our own reflector in Portuguese, organizing a Marathon (from April to October - Mountain Season), repeat the Brazilian SOTA Weekend (it was a success last year) and refactoring our website (sotabrasil.com.br - refactoring not yet ready).
Thought not to have even happened by several at the time. The logged QSOs don’t bear scrutiny on several levels.
Another group subsequently attempted to do the same “24 in 24”. They failed due to running out of fuel in Wales but nonetheless, they probably still hold the UK record for activations in a day, maybe even the world record.
Hi Andy. We discussed here and we do think it’s a very good idea to have a portuguese section in this official SOTA reflector. Is it possible to set up this?
