A long time ham friend of mine here in Boise, K7MK, introduced me to SOTA last fall. When he told me about it I said I was "All in -- lets do it!" As we await weather appropriate for Activations I have been doing some Chasing as well as studying the summit situation here in pnwSOTA. I am an naturally inquisitive person with an analyatic bent so this was a perfect topic to waste an afternoon on. I looked around for an existing summit data source but could not find one. (And if anyone knows of one please let me know.) I ended up downloading the raw data from the sota mapping project and going through a couple of tedious, though not difficult, processing steps to get it into an Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet can be found in the Downloads section should you want to play with it. Once in Excel it was easy to combine it with some other easily accessible facts and do some calculations to profile the summits in each state. From there I could also create charts that compared the summits in each state. These charts can also be found in the Downloads section. I offer these charts without comment or analysis. I will let the reader draw whatever conclusions they want. If you come up with something interesting or chose to grab the spreadsheet and do some crunching on your own -- please share it with the group.
de Scott/K7ZO
Update - 18 February 2015
Since I first posted this note I found what I was looking for as far as a source of summit data. As often happens, "It was hiding in plain sight!". On the SOTA Summit Database there is a tab for "Summits". The first selection at the top is "List of all Summits". If you chose that and select an Association and Region, it will display a table of the summits in that region. Then, if you look, way down at the bottom of the page is a note with a link: NOTE : You can download a CSV file containing a list of all summits by clicking here. That indeed does download a CSV list of all the summits Worldwide. It has pretty much everything in it I extracted from the mapping project database, except the grid locator. Now that I have this I have a couple other investigations in mind.
de Scott/K7ZO
Nicely Done
Scott -
A very interesting and useful analysis - thanks for doing this!
Now all you need is to get on the air from one of these summits!
Etienne-K7ATN
Nicely Done
Scott -
Thanks for the fun analysis of Northwest SOTA summits - now all you need to do is get on the air from one!
Etienne-K7ATN
Nicely Done
Scott -
Thanks for the fun analysis of Northwest SOTA summits - now all you need to do is get on the air from one!
Etienne-K7ATN
Maidenhead Grid Info for SOTA Summits
Nice job Scott on compiling the Activation info for the PNW Associations. A 6-character Maidenhead Grid designator is available for each SOTA summit, certainly in all the W7 associations in the ARM docs. The grid info in also located on the Summit Info page at the Sotadata.org database of all summits.
This grid locator was calculated in anticipation of more VHF/UHF activity and perhaps someday as a means of a distance scoring mechanism for a future SOTA contest somewhat similar to the existing 160m Stew Perry contest which uses a 4-character grid designator. See http://www.kkn.net/stew/ ...certainly something for the PNW gang to think about for this upcoming summer activation season and as a way to promote SOTA and VHF activity.
Good luck on your upcoming SOTA activations! 72, Guy/n7un
W7I grid info...
Scott,
If you go to http://www.sota.org.uk/docs/ARM-W7-Idaho.pdf, you can download the six-place grid locator for W7I. All the other W7 Association also have the 6-place grid locator in the ARM doc. If you want more data, contact me at my qrz email address. 73, Guy/n7un
Update on summit data source
Since I first posted this note I found what I was looking for as far as a source of summit data. As often happens, "It was hiding in plain sight!". On the SOTA Summit Database there is a tab for "Summits". The first selection at the top is "List of all Summits". If you chose that and select an Association and Region, it will display a table of the summits in that region. Then, if you look, way down at the bottom of the page is a note with a link: NOTE : You can download a CSV file containing a list of all summits by clicking here
That indeed does download a CSV list of all the summits Worldwide. It has pretty much everything in it I extracted from the mapping project database, except the grid locator. Now that I have this I have a couple other investigations in mind.
de Scott/K7ZO