I use a lot of terms that I explain the first
time I use it in a post but not in following posts. To help you figure out what the hell I’m
talking about, I created this terms sheet.
I hope it helps.
SOTA stands for
“Summits On The Air”. The “activator” /
hiker, goes to the top of a mountain, setes up a mobile ham radio (could be a
hand-held radio, or a mobile ameture radio and makes a minimum of four contacts
to get points for that mountain. I think
it was started in the UK and is an activity that ham radio operators do to get
out of the house, do some hiking, and geek out.
I enjoy it because I can actually get better performance out of my gear
on a lonely mountaintop. There is no
extraneous radio interference coming from all the stuff in the house and
surrounding neighborhood. To my
equipment, it looks like the antenna is thousands of feet in the air. I’ve been able to have a conversation with
stations in Japan on only 5 watts and I’ve spoken to stations as far away as
New Zealand. That’s pretty awesome!!!
SOTA has been carefully designed to make
participation possible for all Radio Amateurs and Shortwave Listeners - this is
not just for mountaineers! There
are awards for activators (those who ascend to the summits) and chasers (who
either operate from home, a local hilltop or are even Activators on other
summits). For more on SOTA, go HERE. Some of the terms seem kind of strange to Americans'. The reason is most likely that SOTA was not designed in the US, it was invented in Great-Britain in 2002 in the UK. (Wikipedia page)