My standard SOTA setup is a Yaesu FT-90 compact VHF/UHF transceiver stuffed into a fanny pack with its Bioenno battery pack. The fanny pack is a pretty nice flyfishing pack that I position on the front side of me so I can easily see and operate the radio. I am usually holding the 2m or 70 cm Yagi antenna and talking on the microphone.

I’ve been looking for a way to clip the microphone onto the pack. Typically, what happens now is I drop the microphone and it gets banged up when it hits the rocky ground. I needed a way to easily hang it on the side of the pack. I recalled having an old cellphone belt clip that accepts the standard button on the back of a mobile microphone, but I couldn’t locate it. However, I did find one on Amazon.

I clipped it onto my fanny pack and the Yaesu microphone hangs quite nicely on it. This clip can be used for other applications…anywhere you want to hang a microphone onto a backpack, belt, or whatever. Depending on your station configuration, this may be useful for all kinds of portable operating: SOTA, POTA, and satellites.

73 Bob K0NR

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Who really uses the VHF and higher bands (>50 MHz) for Summits On The Air? Last year, I pulled some data from the SOTA database and provided some analysis.

Looking at VHF/UHF SOTA Data

Here is the short story:

Roughly 20% of the SOTA contacts worldwide are on VHF/UHF frequencies and about 90% of these are on 2m FM.

So that’s the information that is in the official SOTA database. For SOTA, I pretty much operate on the VHF/UHF bands so over time I’ve noticed that four types of operators use VHF/UHF for SOTA. Of course, this is based on my own observations, mostly in Colorado but also in other states.

Beginners

Many newer hams or new-to-SOTA hams just grab their handheld radio and go do a SOTA activation. This makes a lot of sense, assuming there is reasonable 2m FM simplex activity around. Summits that are within VHF range of large population areas usually work quite well. A Technician license is sufficient to have fun with this mode (both activating and chasing). If you are new to ham radio, like the outdoors, and have SOTA summits in your area, this is a fun activity to pursue!

HF+VHF Ops

Many SOTA activators are after longer distance contacts so they naturally gravitate to the HF bands. Some leave VHF behind, as they focus on HF operating. However, many SOTA activators and chasers keep a VHF radio in their toolkit, often treating it as an add-on to their HF activity. Sometimes the VHF radio becomes the fail-safe mode if things are not working well on the HF bands. Sometimes, I hear activators say something like “the HF gear was just not working for me today, so I had to use my HT to log four contacts.”

Non-SOTA Ops

There are quite a few hams out there on 2m FM that are not really focused on SOTA. They like to hang out on 2m FM simplex, especially 146.52 MHz, to chat with whoever comes along. In the backcountry, this may include hikers, snowshoers, skiers, 4WD enthusiasts, campers, etc. It also includes hams just hanging around the shack with a radio or scanner monitoring 2m FM. Announce that you are on top of a summit and these folks are happy to contact you.

VHF Enthusiasts

Finally, there are VHF/UHF enthusiasts that like the combination of higher frequencies and mountaintop operating. The effect of Height Above Average Terrain (HAAT) has a huge impact at these frequencies. A 5-watt handheld (HT) might be limited to a few miles on flat terrain, but from the top of a summit, the range extends dramatically (50 to 100 miles). Improve your station and 200-to-300-mile contacts are achievable. Most of this action is still on 2m FM but adding in additional bands (70 cm, 23 cm) and modes (CW, SSB) provides another challenge. Chasers are included in this category as well…there are VHF/UHF enthusiasts that are challenged by working distant summits from home.

Summary

These are the four categories of folks I usually encounter on the VHF/UHF bands when doing SOTA. Do these match your experience? What did I miss?

73 Bob K0NR

The post Who Does VHF SOTA? appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Setting operating goals has been useful for me in ham radio. They often provided a reason or incentive for me to get on the air and make some contacts. I followed the typical award sequence of Worked All States (WAS), Worked All Continents (WAC), DX Century Club (DXCC), and so forth. I wrote about it here: Pursue Radio Operating Goals.

Gamification

Over time, I’ve come to realize that some amateur radio activities include the elements of gamification. Gamification is a hot topic in user interface design, online learning, and other computer-based systems. The basic idea is to incorporate gaming techniques into activities to increase user engagement. From Wikipedia:

Gamification techniques are intended to leverage people’s natural desires for socializing, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, or closure, or simply their response to the framing of a situation as game or play.

Gamification commonly uses these elements (also from Wikipedia):

Game design elements are the basic building blocks of gamification applications. Among these typical game design elements, are points, badges, leader-boards, performance graphs, meaningful stories, avatars, and teammates.

This article discusses some of the principles involved and Dennis/AD6DM wrote this piece on the topic: The Gamification of Ham Radio.

Summits On The Air

I first became aware of this topic after I became involved in Summits On The Air (SOTA). Before SOTA was a thing, I was often found on the top of some summit making radio contacts. So when SOTA was established in Colorado (W0C), I thought “this is interesting but I am already doing it.” It did strike my fancy enough that I started submitting logs into the SOTA database. Oh, guess what, many of my mountaintop operations were the first activation for SOTA. How about that? I am the first. I win. I have bragging rights, or something.

Soon I was accumulating SOTA activator and chaser points. My first objective was to qualify for the 100-point activator certificate. (SOTA has many certificates and awards.) Achieving 100 points took me about 15 activations, so it is not too difficult but does represent an accomplishment. It did not take very long to do this and soon I was focused on 1000 points for the coveted Mountain Goat award. That goal took several years to complete, but I got it done. I decided to only use the VHF/UHF bands for the Mountain Goat award, so that was my little personal twist on that accomplishment.

We can clearly see that the SOTA program has these elements of gamification: points, badges (certificates/awards), and leaderboards. For me, the leaderboard is the Activator Role of Honour, with the Colorado (W0C) Association selected:

At the moment, I am #12 on the list. I do not aspire to be at the top of the list but I do want to be on the list, somewhere above the 1000 mark. I also like to see how my fellow W0C SOTA activators have been doing. For example, it has been fun to watch Szymon/WV0X go from zero activator points to over 1800 in a short period of time. Also, Gary/W0MNA and Martha/W0ERI are a couple from Kansas (no SOTA summits in the state) that have both made it to Mountain Goat. Not an easy accomplishment. It is cool to see that we have 19 Mountain Goats in the association and more on their way. Pretty good!

SOTA does not specifically have any teams formed as part of the program but the camaraderie of W0C is essentially a team. We share information about various summits and encourage each other when new goals are achieved. Sometimes groups of activators get together for a joint activation. (Most areas that have significant SOTA activity also have this community/team effect.)

Parks On The Air

Recently, I have become involved with Parks On The Air (POTA), which also has gamification built into it. POTA has the advantage of parks being virtually everywhere. (Unlike SOTA summits, Kansas has parks to activate.) As Joyce/K0JJW and I have traveled around the country, POTA has been a satisfying activity to include in our plans.

POTA has many different award schemes, too many to mention here. I pulled up my awards page to see what I have qualified for:

The objective I have set for POTA is to activate all the parks in Colorado. I want to visit them anyway, so this is a good opportunity to blend ham radio with our travel plans. There are 187 POTA parks in Colorado, so this is going to take a while to complete.

Implications

Gamification can be used to make ham radio activity more fun and to more fully engage the participants. Traditional radio contesting is clearly a competition and has the elements of keeping score, having leaderboards (after the contest) and having teammates. However, most contests provide painfully slow feedback. The official results may not be posted until 6 months later. (The 3830 Scores website was created to bypass this delay by sharing scores immediately.) Contesting is obviously a game, so where’s the gamification?

Perhaps your radio club (or just your group of ham friends) can use gamification to have fun. You could leverage programs like SOTA and POTA to create a club activity. Pursue a club goal (activate 50 parks or summits this year), a friendly competition, whatever. POTA lets you activate with a club call while still providing credit for the operator, so that opens up some possibilities.

If you are getting stale in your ham radio operating, perhaps one of these gamified programs would be good motivation for you. It could be SOTA or POTA (both include chasing, so you can do it from home), or maybe some other program out there.

Those are my thoughts. What do you think?

73 Bob K0NR

The post Ham Radio Gamification appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Last year, Joyce/K0JJW and I tried to activate Red Mountain Number 3 (W0C/UR-016) for SOTA in the San Juan mountains. The map showed there was a road to the top, so we were expecting easy access. However, the road is gated off about 2 miles from the summit, requiring a hike. So we hiked almost to the summit but turned back when the thunderstorms rolled in. We retreated to safety and vowed to return another day.

This week, we went back and activated the summit, along with Stu/W0STU and Liz/KT0LIZ. Red Mountain No. 3 sits just southwest of its sister summits: Red Mountain No.1 and Red Mountain No. 2. (Red Mtn 1 is also a SOTA summit, so we’ll need to activate that one sometime.)

We accessed Red Mountain 3 (RM3) by taking Highway 550 to Red Mountain Pass. The road for RM3 is County Road 14 but is not well marked. The turnoff (shown on the map above) is just south of Red Mtn Pass, going to the east (37.89587, -107.71369). County Road 14 is a narrow but easy road, barely 4WD, that leads to the gate (37.89476, -107.70774). We parked there and hiked up the road.

I don’t usually like to hike on roads but this one turned out to be just fine. It was a nice, easy grade and was flat without a lot of rocks poking up. My GPS app shows that we hiked 2 miles one-way with 1400 vertical feet. We met about a dozen people on the hike, so this seems like a popular summit. We noted other trails and roads in the area and wondered if some of them might provide a better route but everyone we saw just used the road.

As you can see from the photos, we had excellent weather that day. This time, no thunderstorms to chase us off the peak!

Stu/W0STU examines his VHF/UHF handheld, positioning it for optimum signal level.The San Juan mountains are remote, with not a lot of people within VHF range. We were all using just VHF/UHF for SOTA, so I was concerned we could get skunked on making our four SOTA contacts. There are a few smaller towns within range and we might be able to work Grand Junction from there. I knew that Lloyd/W7SAO in Delta usually monitors 146.52 MHz and we worked him right away. After that, we called our fellow campers, James/KD0MFO and Vic/KD0OGE, working them mobile near Ridgway. We kept calling for a fourth contact and sure enough, Mike/KE5YF showed up on 2m FM. Mike is from Sweetwater, TX and was driving his Off-Highway Vehicle (OHV) over Engineer Pass. So we made our four contacts to qualify for SOTA points.

The four of us had a great day on the summit. We took our time and enjoyed the hike and the radio operating. The easy access and excellent views from the top make this an attractive SOTA summit if you are traveling in this area.

73 Bob K0NR

The post SOTA Success on Red Mountain #3 appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Last year, Joyce/K0JJW and I tried to activate Red Mountain Number 3 (W0C/UR-016) for SOTA in the San Juan mountains. The map showed there was a road to the top, so we were expecting easy access. However, the road is gated off about 2 miles from the summit, requiring a hike. So we hiked almost to the summit but turned back when the thunderstorms rolled in. We retreated to safety and vowed to return another day.

This week, we went back and activated the summit, along with Stu/W0STU and Liz/KT0LIZ. Red Mountain No. 3 sits just southwest of its sister summits: Red Mountain No.1 and Red Mountain No. 2. (Red Mtn 1 is also a SOTA summit, so we’ll need to activate that one sometime.)

We accessed Red Mountain 3 (RM3) by taking Highway 550 to Red Mountain Pass. The road for RM3 is County Road 14 but is not well marked. The turnoff (shown on the map above) is just south of Red Mtn Pass, going to the east (37.89587, -107.71369). County Road 14 is a narrow but easy road, barely 4WD, that leads to the gate (37.89476, -107.70774). We parked there and hiked up the road.

I don’t usually like to hike on roads but this one turned out to be just fine. It was a nice, easy grade and was flat without a lot of rocks poking up. My GPS app shows that we hiked 2 miles one-way with 1400 vertical feet. We met about a dozen people on the hike, so this seems like a popular summit. We noted other trails and roads in the area and wondered if some of them might provide a better route but everyone we saw just used the road.

As you can see from the photos, we had excellent weather that day. This time, no thunderstorms to chase us off the peak!

Stu/W0STU examines his VHF/UHF handheld, positioning it for optimum signal level.The San Juan mountains are remote, with not a lot of people within VHF range. We were all using just VHF/UHF for SOTA, so I was concerned we could get skunked on making our four SOTA contacts. There are a few smaller towns within range and we might be able to work Grand Junction from there. I knew that Lloyd/W7SAO in Delta usually monitors 146.52 MHz and we worked him right away. After that, we called our fellow campers, James/KD0MFO and Vic/KD0OGE, working them mobile near Ridgway. We kept calling for a fourth contact and sure enough, Mike/KE5YF showed up on 2m FM. Mike is from Sweetwater, TX and was driving his Off-Highway Vehicle (OHV) over Engineer Pass. So we made our four contacts to qualify for SOTA points.

The four of us had a great day on the summit. We took our time and enjoyed the hike and the radio operating. The easy access and excellent views from the top make this an attractive SOTA summit if you are traveling in this area.

73 Bob K0NR

The post SOTA Success on Red Mountain #3 appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

There are over 50 summits in Colorado with an elevation of 14,000 feet or higher. These are commonly called fourteeners (or 14ers) and get a lot of attention from outdoor enthusiasts. Some folks have climbed all of them, which quickly leads to the question of What Is A Fourteener? This question is really about what is a distinct fourteener versus when is a summit just a subpeak of another fourteener. The Colorado Mountain Club list of 14ers shows 54 peaks, while other lists include a few more summits. Doing a search on Lists Of John reveals there are 74 locations in the state that exceed 14,000 feet. What constitutes “the correct list of 14ers” is often debated in the climbing community but I won’t try to sort that out here. I’ll use the Colorado Mountain Club list of 54 summits for this posting.

Summits On The Air (SOTA)

Obviously, if these are the 54 highest summits in Colorado, they are all going to be SOTA summits, right? Not so fast, Sir Edmund. The SOTA program generally requires summits to have 150 meters (492 feet) of prominence, a measure of the elevation of a summit relative to the surrounding terrain. From peaklist.org:

Prominence is the elevation of a summit relative to the highest point to which one must descend before reascending to a higher summit. 

There are exceptions in the SOTA program that allow for summits of 100-meter prominence, but this does not apply to Colorado. Paul/VK5PAS has a webpage that explains prominence as applied to SOTA.

In recent history, the folks that set up the SOTA Associations have done a great job of sorting through what is a valid summit. In the US, there are excellent databases of geographic information that make this possible. Which is to say that in a particular SOTA Association, a consistent method is applied for determining “what is a summit”? This is all documented for Colorado in the W0C SOTA ARM here: https://sotastore.blob.core.windows.net/arms/ARM-W0C-3_3.pdf

Lincoln, Bross, Democrat, and Cameron

Now, back to the Colorado 14ers. There is a popular trek that allows a climber to summit four 14ers in one day, without extreme effort. The trail starts at Kite Lake, heads up to Mount Democrat (14155 ft), then over to Mount Cameron (14222 feet), and on to Mount Lincoln (14293 feet). The return trip passes over Mount Bross (14178 feet) and back down to Kite Lake. (There have been access issues in recent years concerning private property on this loop, so be sure to check that out and respect any closures).

If we check out the official list of SOTA summits, we will find Mount Democrat (W0C/SR-059) and Mount Lincoln (W0C/FR-001) listed but not Mount Cameron and Mount Bross. Per Lists of John, Cameron and Bross have prominences of 152 and 315 feet. The col between Lincoln and Cameron, does not drop down enough to provide Cameron with sufficient prominence. Same with the col between Cameron and Bross. Mount Lincoln has the highest elevation of those three summits and wins the honor of being listed as a SOTA summit. Note that Democrat, with the lowest elevation of the four summits, does qualify for the SOTA list due to its 770 feet of prominence. (There is a big enough dip between Democrat and Cameron.)

Now back to the list of 54 Colorado Fourteeners: Mount Cameron is not on the list but it often shows up on other 14er lists. Mount Bross is shown on the list of 54 but is not a SOTA summit. There are seven other Colorado 14ers that don’t qualify for SOTA: Crestone Needle, El Diente Peak, Tabeguache Peak, Sunlight Peak, Ellingwood Point, Little Bear Peak, and North Maroon Peak.

You don’t need to become an expert on calculating prominence to do SOTA activations. Really, the key thing is to check the SOTA list and make sure your intended summit is on the list before you hit the trail.

73 Bob K0NR

The post Why is a 14,000 Foot Summit Not Valid for SOTA? appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Rito Alto Peak is an easy 13er about 15 miles west of Westcliffe, CO in the Sangre De Cristo mountain range. This summit caught my attention because it was near Hermit Pass, one of the highest passes in Colorado at 13047 feet. We’ve been taking the Jeep up the highest roads in Colorado, and Hermit Pass was on The List. Looking around on the map, I noticed that Rito Alto Peak was an unactivated 10-point SOTA summit right next to the pass. Not only that, the summit is in the San Juan National Forest (K-4404), enabling a POTA activation as well. So how could we not do a trip up there?

Rito Alto Peak (W0C/SC-004) and Hermit Pass are about 15 miles straight west of Westcliffe, CO. To get there, take CR 160 (Hermit Road) west and then turn south onto FS 160. The turn-off is easy to spot and begins the 4WD portion of the trip. The 4WD road is not particularly difficult from a technical point of view, but the road is very rocky for most of the 9 miles. Every once in a while, the road has a smoother section, only to be followed by lots of rocks. I call these roads “moderate but annoying.” Any real 4WD vehicle should be able to handle this. We drove our stock Jeep Wrangler and it did fine. This is not a road for Suburu-class SUVs.

At the end of the 9 miles of bouncing up the road, we parked at Hermit Pass and started the climb there. (It took us about 2 hours to drive this road.) Of course, you can always hike some or all of the road. Useful climbing info can be found here on 14ers.com. Hermit Peak, to the south of the pass, is NOT a SOTA summit. However, further south is Eureka Mountain (W0C/SC-007), which could also be hiked from Hermit Pass.

The figure above shows the track of our climbing route. There is no trail and there is plenty of talus to step over and around. The route is not critical but we tended to stay on top of the ridge line, sometimes deviating to find a better path. The distance was 0.7 miles one way with an elevation gain of 700 feet. So not too difficult, except for climbing over rocks. Trekking poles are highly recommended.

On the summit, we set up our normal 2m FM station: the Yaesu FT-90 transceiver with 3-element 2m Yagi antenna, and started calling on 146.52 MHz. Joyce made the first contact so she has the honor of doing the first SOTA activation from this summit. You Go Girl!

I was a bit worried about getting enough contacts to qualify for SOTA points but that turned out to not be a problem. We heard strong signals from the Buena Vista area (W0BV, KD0MRC) and Florrisant (K0MGL). We also made some Summit-to-Summit QSOs (S2S): WV0X (St Charles Peak, W0C/SC-031), W0ADV (Snowmass Mountain, W0C/WE-003), and W0CP (McQuaid Butte, W0C/SP-109). We also worked K0EEP, K9RZK, W9RIK, and W9NDR. Our Best DX for the day was 104 miles, with W0ADV on Snowmass. Thanks for all of the 2m FM QSOs!

As shown in the photos, the weather was excellent. We took our time on the mountain and never saw signs of thunderstorms. The climb down was easy and we returned to the Jeep. Then it was 9 more miles bouncing down the road and on to Westcliffe for a late lunch. What a great day for SOTA + POTA + Jeep trip.

73 Bob K0NR

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