Summits On The Air
awards program for radio amateurs operating from mountainous locations
Summits On The Air (SOTA) is an amateur radio operating award program launched in Great Britain in 2002 by John Linford.
The aim of SOTA is to encourage licensed amateur radio operators to operate temporarily from mountainous locations using any method of travel including hiking, mountain climbing, and cycling while operating their amateur radio station from the summits of hills and mountains. In addition to getting operators out into the field the program encourages others to listen in to the transmissions from these stations and make a two-way radio contact with the SOTA station. An activator must achieve at least 4 two-way contacts to achieve a successful activation, using any amateur radio band or mode. An activator may use multiple modes and/or bands on an activation to achieve this. In areas that are not remote or difficult to access some SOTA activations serve as community outreach events.
The program now has over 33,842 participants world wide, with about 7,000 in the United States. Amateur radio operators who set up stations on mountain peaks are known as activators, and other amateur radio operators who complete contacts with them are called chasers. Points are given to both activators and chasers based on the height of the summit. A seasonal bonus may be made available to reflect the increased difficulty of activations of certain summits in the bonus period, such as higher summits in winter.
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This entry incorporates text from “Summits On The Air” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.