SOTA activations

[wheelerdh]

I've been interested lately in the idea of working Summits On The Air. I figured it not only gets the truck on the trails but it gets me hiking as well. I've read the threads on here and looked up the SOTA website, but can someone chime in and explain how you go about it?

To my understanding, you register, pack your gear and start hiking. On the SOTA website it has some of the summits noted and you can go there and start calling CQ. Is that essentially it?

Also, for 2m, is it standard practice to use the calling frequency, or something else (maybe close by)? I assume HF is fair game if you want to.

Curious.

 

[SD07NISMO]

I've "activated" only three summits in Southern California for SOTA so far; it's pretty straightforward. You first want to look up what region you are in at http://www.sota.org.uk/Associations, this is probably the easiest way to find peaks in your area and also find out how many points the different peaks are worth. For example I am located in W6 which has 3716 qualifying peaks. Generally the higher and/or more remote a peak is the more points it will be worth; you can also get bonus points for winter activations of some peaks. Once you find a peak that looks interesting go climb it. Technically I believe you can activate on any band/mode which you are licensed to operate on. I have only ever activated with FM voice on 2m, so I was limited to mostly a local area but you might be surprised how far a little 5W HT can reach. You need 4 unique QSOs to count as an "activation"; you can self-spot on http://www.sotawatch.org/ although this is probably most useful when using HF. Every time I have activated I have just started calling on 146.52, sometimes it takes a little while, but that's part of the fun! It seems like every time I have made a contact the other person had never heard of SOTA but was pretty interested to learn that I was sitting high up on some peak with just a small HT. You will want to record the call sign and the UTC time of each contact in order to log them later at http://www.sotadata.org.uk. You can only get points for a single summit activation once per year, which is a good incentive to get out and hit some new peaks. Let me know if you have any other questions.

 

[wheelerdh]

Sounds pretty straight forward, I have a lot of places to go in my area and most have never been activated. I didn't know that you can only claim points once a year, somewhat of a bummer. But this information is great! I think it goes pretty well for the theme of this forum, I'll have to get the final parts for my portable station put together and start hiking!