It is reasonable to expect that two regions in an Association can come to an agreement about which region can claim a summit, if they cannot agree then the AM can adjudicate. Where two Associations can claim a summit because it lies on the boundary then the matter becomes political in nature and it is not up to SOTA to intervene in a political dispute, the wise decision is to get out of the way and let the Associations share the summit. If in fact the political boundary does not cross the highest point then there is no dispute, the summit can only be claimed by the Association within which AZ the summit lies. A grey area here is a snow summit where the underlying rock is masked, and the highest point of the snow will vary from time to time because of the action of the wind. If there is no permanent summit marker then it is probably best that this summit should be shared, too. I hope this is clear.
I know at least one example where the highest point of the sumit lies on one side of the border and yet it is claimed by another association, too.
I understand that this is undesired and not covered by SOTA spirit and rules and slipped throught MT’s quality control of the ARM lists and will be fixed in the near future?
There are currently 19,389 summits in SOTA. If we assume that checking a single summit takes 5 minutes, working flat out, 8 hours a day it would take the MT just over 200 days to check all the summits. Maybe you could help them by being a bit more specific?
73
Richard
G3CWI
PS Just to make a start, I can confirm that it is not The Cloud!
Brian’s answer seems to indicate that double-activations of single summits are against SOTA rules & spirit unless the border line traverses the highest point of the summit.
If this is the case - and this is my question - the ARMs need to be cleaned up.
As for the “how” 2 easy ways:
1)the ARMs contain height and coordinates of summits. Filtering out “double” summits is quite possible using usual IT methods.
2)Or manually use google earth and the kmz file containing all SOTAs, follow the political borders and you will see.
In reply to DF9TS:
Is this the mapped highest point or the highest point as seen on the ground and different to the mapped highest point? Is the highest point snow/ice or rock? Is the border correctly shown, as it is uncommon for an international border to not use an obvious topographic feature and it might be necessary to resolve the question by examining the terms of the treaty defining the border. You have given us very little to work on, I’m afraid! However, once we know which summit you are referring to then if an error is identified it can be corrected in the next revision of the appropriate summit list.
Is it within the rules and spirit of SOTA that if the highest point of a summit lies outside of an association’s political border that this summit is included in this ARM?
In reply to DF9TS:
If the summit lies outside of an Associations border, and the border is correct and not misplaced on the map in such a way as to exclude a summit that it should actually cross, then I don’t see how that Association can lay claim to the summit. Owning part of the AZ does not validate a claim to a summit outside the border. This reasoning has been applied in a number of cases including a couple in the UK. In one case in the UK a summit was transferred from G to GW because re-surveying showed that the mapped highest point was lower than another point over the border. We have to bear in mind that surveyed high spots can have an error of +/- a few metres, and the eye can be fooled into seeing a false highest point, but where a summit can be proven to be outside the political boundary defining an Association then that Association cannot claim the summit.
OK/JC-030 (Špicák) is
= NOT the highest point
= Still lying in DM
= Having NO reference in DM
= Referenced in OK
= Having no P100, and probably no P50
= First activated by OK/DD1LD/P
in case the MT sees themselves in no position to check the ARMs may I suggest to make a clear General rule on double activations along your statements to rule out that sort of double activations?
If the MT has no time / capacity / capability to check the ARMs this could be clearly said - the responsability for correct ARMs could/should fall under the associations responsability solely and clearly then, right?
ARMs can be checked but it is very time consuming, the summits mentioned above will be examined when time permits using more than one source of data. I suggest that any more summits which anyone might consider questionable should be sent direct to the MT since those dealing with summits do not monitor the reflector full time. It would be courteous to deal first with the AM.
Gerd, you appear to be confusing the two issues of questions about summit accuracy and shared summit activating. The present rule will be scrutinised in due course and may or may not be changed in the next revision of the rules, I cannot pre-empt the discussions of the MT.
In the past the responsibility for the contents of an ARM has rested entirely on the Association, they still draw up the lists and verify the data. Recently good sources of data have become available which permit the MT to check Association data, this is very time consuming and unless the data is found to be suspect then only a sample is checked, except that in some countries good maps are unavailable in which case more use is made of the MTs data sources.
But I was wondering how did you find so much time for the complete revision of all DM/DL summits (more than one thousand) where you were haggling over the last altitude meter? I guess, the job was so time consuming that you were not able to cross the DM/DL boundaries till now
I would like to give some advise to activators who are keen on SOTA points. Climb the “crispy” alpine ridges with double referenced summits or better go to DM/OK in order to maximize your score with the minimal effort!
The complete revision of each and every DL summit by MT seems to indicate - along Brian’s words - that each and every summit in the DL list was supicious!
Also I understand that nothing will be done on “out of territory” summits by MT since this is “too time consuming” - thus my suggestion that MT deliberately steps down from checking ARMs - because checking some associations to a ridicoulous extend and not others has a bad taste to me - or is it pure coincidence?
