What is POTA, SOTA?
POTA = Park on The Air, SOTA = Summits On The Air, is basically an activity where ham radio operators take their radio equipment to a hill or mountain summit or park , set up a portable station and attempt to communicate with other ham radio operators. In most cases the ham radio operator has to hike to the summit, operation from a vehicle is not allowed.
SOTA is an international cooperative effort to coordinate communications (i.e. contacts) between ham radio/amateur radio operators (hams) that have scaled a mountain summit with radio equipment and other hams that want to contact them. There is an awards schedule that provides recognition to those hams that have scaled peaks (activators) and those that contacted them on the peaks (chasers). SOTA, as an organization, provides permanent logs, certificates and an ability for chasers to know when an activator is operating from a mountain peak. To ‘activate’ a summit, at least four unique contacts must be made from the summit within 25 meters (vertically) of its peak.
SOTA operates in nearly 100 countries with each country having their own association(s). Each association is responsible for identifying summits that meet SOTA requirement of at least 150 meter prominence over other peaks. Each qualified peak is identified with an unique tag and is listed in the summit database. For example, the association for California, where I do the majority of my operation, is W6 with sixteen regions covering 4284 summits!
Obviously when climbing to a summit you want to minimize the weight that you are carrying, so much of the adventure is figuring out the best equipment and setup for your station on the summit. Activators don’t carry large radios that would ordinarily be used at a fixed station. There are specially designed modern radios that are small and lightweight – both commercially built and hand built – that provide very good operating characteristics and work well for SOTA operation. Likewise, antennas and transmit power are limited by size and weight. But operating on a high, isolated summit provides a great location to make contact with other hams throughout the US and internationally, making up for antenna and power constraints. And the scenery is fantastic.
Visit https://www.sota.org.uk/
Main – list and display SOTA summits on map – sotamaps.org
IQ3QC – Mountain QRP Club
Alessandro IK2WSG “an ordinary mountain trip”