Showing posts with label SOTA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SOTA. Show all posts

Sunday, November 26, 2023

28 MHz Summits on the Air Challenge for 2024


One of the popular amateur radio award programmes is Summits on the Air (SOTA) and it's relatively easy for people to activate a peak as opposed to going to some exotic DX location.

Andy, MM0FMF has announced a new SOTA Challenge for the 28 MHz (10m) band for all of 2024. It's nice to see a specific challenge for the 10m band and hopefully, it will generate some more activity on this band now that we're near the peak of the solar cycle.

2024 10-metre SOTA Challenge 

Andy MM0FMF writes... "Back in 2013/2014 we were coming to the top of Cycle 24 and we decided to have a challenge. The aim was to encourage activity on the 12m band. I chose 12m for a few reasons, it has almost identical propagation to 10, there’s no contests, it was a very underused band in SOTA, I could fit a 12m 1/4GP on my fibreglass pole. The last was important, I didn’t need to spend any extra money :wink: Huge fun was had by people who took part, much DX was worked. My most memorable QSOs were random chases by VK stations to the UK at lunchtime rather than greyline.

So now Cycle 25 it starting to show it means business and we enjoyed just how much fun can be had on the higher bands in the recent NA<>EU S2S activity day when the Sun produces SFI figures around 150 and we get people organised to be on the air at the same time.

It’s the right time to run another challenge. We’ve done 12m and we didn’t pick it again because we try to be inclusive on SOTA and I didn’t check 12m allocations worldwide last time. Not every licence class gets access to 12m, in some countries only the top licence types get access. But on 10m the situation is very different with most licence types giving some or complete access, more people can take part than on 12m.

The aim of the challenge is to get everyone using 10m a lot. Since 2013 we have added 95 new associations with many in South America, Asia and the Caribbean. So now there should always be DX for someone workable :o) (Don’t forget, EU is DX for some!)

Andy, MM0FMF activating a SOTA summit

Scoring will be done automatically by the database software. You just need to enter your activations and chases as normal, the software will note 10m QSOs and score them according to the rules below. Normal SOTA rules apply so if you do a multi-band activation, just enter it as normal and your normal SOTA results get updated and qualifying 10m QSOs get scored completely separately.

There will be a special 10m Challenge results page. But note, lots of you said you don’t want SOTA contests and we listened. There will not be an overall winner or association winners. The challenge results pages will be sorted alphabetically by callsign and you will be able to see how well you are doing . If you want you can compare your results with others to see if your equipment is as good or if you get a better score per activation etc. A certificate will be available showing your name, call, association and score.

The challenge runs from 0000Z January 1st 2024 to 2359Z December 31st 2024

Scoring for chasers:
For every unique summit you chase on 10m you get a multiplier.
For every unique activator you chase you get 1 chaser challenge point.
Your final score is chaser challenge points * multipliers.

Scoring for activators:
For every unique summit you activate on 10m you get a multiplier.
For every unique chaser you work you get 1 activator challenge point.
Your final score is activator challenge points * multipliers
."


For more information about the Summits on the Air award programme, go to https://www.sota.org.uk/

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Mount Snowdon worked on 145 MHz...


I made an interesting contact this morning when I worked Dave, GW8NZN/P on the summit of Mt.Snowdon on 145.400 MHz FM. The distance was 200 miles / 323 kms and it turned out that the mid point for the path was over the east coast of Ireland.

On my end, I was using 5w & 50w into a home made vertical antenna in the attic of my house. Dave was using 5w from a Yaesu FT60 handheld and a Moonraker MRW222 telescopic whip. Obviously being on the summit of the highest mountain of Wales at 1085m helps a lot but I thought it was an interesting contact on FM all the same.

After the contact, I came across the SOTAWATCH website which has lots of information about current and upcoming summit activations. It's worth keeping a watch on it if you want to try to make some distant contacts. The website is http://www.sotawatch.org/