SOTA available?

I see POTA has a drop down. Will SOTA be added as well?

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Working on it it now, actually. I live in KS so Iā€™ve never participated in SOTA :wink: Iā€™ve been having a conversation with a guy on Reddit who says really the current POTA template would work for SOTA if I changed ā€˜their park/my parkā€™ to ā€˜Their Summit/My Summitā€™, etc. Does that sound accurate? I probably just need to google SOTA paper logs and see what they look like.

Hi Jarrett,
Yeah, not much SOTA in KS :grinning:
I do a lot of SOTA hence why I asked. I just purchased your app and plan on doing a SOTA
activation this week. Once I do I will try and UL to SOTA with my log and see if it takes it.
Changing the POTA park to SOTA name should do the trick on your end.

If you need to beta test the changes, I am happy to do it.

Yes, that would work for input, however the ouptut needs to be a CSV and formatted with slightly different information. For instance, you donā€™t tell them you were on the 40m band, you tell them you used 7MHz. And the beginning of every line in the CSV needs to be a cell that says ā€œV2ā€. The actual name of the file is not as important (not like it is in POTA).
Iā€™ll email you a log file I submitted.

That would be awesome, thank you!

sent, check your email

I also do both POTA and SOTA here in the State of Oregon. Many times when I am on a Summit I am also in a National Park which makes it both a SOTA and POTA activation at them same time.

With POTA you need 10 contacts to make it a valid activation. With SOTA you need 4 contacts to make it a valid activation.

Unlike POTA. SOTA only allows one contact per Summit regardless of the band. So if you work both 20 and 40 meters and make contact with the same station on both bands it still only counts against SOTA as one contact.
73ā€™s
Ron W7HO

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The ADIF export file has different headers for SOTA.

I would be happy to send you a ADIF file.

Hey Ron, I believe I will try it at a SOTA activation tomorrow morning. I think doing a global replace of the POTA and SOTA commands should take care of the discrepancies for now until Jarrett gets a template for it. Iā€™ll report back how it works out. 73 de KN3A

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@KN3A report back! And if just changing the current POTA template to become SOTA doesnā€™t make sense field-wise let me know. I strive to make these templates as ā€˜tab-ableā€™ as possible. If the exchange for a SOTA contact means I should move fields around for the SOTA template to compensate the flow, let me know!

I will let you know for sure Jarrett. The exchange is the same as POTA, so the fields the way you have it are the sameā€¦Callsign, Exch Sent / Exch Recd and if they are a P2P (or a S2S) it would get plugged into that same box. Thanks! I just looked up my post in the SOTA page last year when I had a similar issue with ACLog converting to SOTA. This was how I fixed it last year, and when I used ACLog two weeks ago. Perhaps this is all I will need to do as well: "In my ACLog I had to just change <MY_SIG_INFO > to <MY_SOTA_REF> and it uploaded fine."

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You rock, thanks a TON.

The ADIF export files from ā€œOutd Logā€ which is designed for SOTA. Has the following fields. The ones in bold are the ones required by the SOTA Database to upload the log.

CALL
QSO_DATE
TIME_ON
MY_SOTA_REF
FREQ
OPERATOR
STATION_CALLSIGN
SOTA_REF
MODE
NAME
QTH
TX_PWR
RST_RCVD
RST_SENT

You note that SOTA uses FREQ and POTA uses BAND for uploads into their Database.

The format for valid input for MY_SOTA_REF (is my summit activated) and SOTA_REF (is for S2S of the other CALL station).
The format for both is example: W7O/NC-002 or W7O NC-002.

Hope that helps

Good afternoon Jarrett - I logged 36 QSOs on my SOTA activation from my Android Samsung S20. The logging went good and I had no issues using it in POTA mode. However, I could not get the log file to be accepted when uploaded to the SOTA database no matter what I did. I ended up manually uploading the logbook to the SOTA site. I will be doing a POTA activation tomorrow so I will use it again for that. I didnā€™t see any bugs, but I did notice after reviewing the log that somehow I managed to log 4 different blank QSOā€™s (easy to delete). I also had cell service so I was getting the pop up bubble, however it did not appear until I tabbed to the next field. I would like to be able to see the info after adding the callsign if that is possible. Also after the pop up appeared, it did not seem to want to go away easily. Not sure if that can be put on a timer. Youā€™re doing such an awesome job with HAMRSā€¦keep up the great job and thank you very much for allowing me to beta test the Android. Iā€™ll use mh Samsung tablet tomorrow. 73 de KN3A.

I was told that SOTA uploads have to be CSV files (which I havenā€™t implemented yet) and not ADI files. Could that be the problem, or am I mistaken on that?

Hi Jarrett,

Actually CSV or ADI files are acceptable with SOTA. Hopefully you can see the screenshot from their page.

73 Scott

@KN3A Good to know! Did it give you any specific error? Did you change the entries in the ADIF to match the SOTA_REF, MY_SOTA_REF instead of SIG_INFO and MY_SIG_INFO?

Jarrett,

I could not get it to work at all and kept getting errors. I ended up manually inserting each QSO that I logged and uploaded it that way. I even imported it into my ACLog and exported and it still didnā€™t go right. I submitted the POTA log for my activation with POTA directly from when I was finished and sent it to the 3 call area person and so far havenā€™t heard if there was any issue with that .adi file. Iā€™ll let you know what he says.

that was me that told you that (about CSVā€™s)ā€¦ and I honestly thought it was CSV onlyā€¦ In fact, I think that came from the fact that I tried ADIF early on and it errored out. Sorry if I sent you on a wild goose-chase with that little (incorrect) tid bit. I do know (but donā€™t understand) that the first column of info needs to be ā€œV2ā€. And that SOTA uses Frequency in MHz, instead of Band. The .csv I emailed you last week did in fact upload to the SOTA database with no issues.

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