Run the IT group for #SOTA as part of the SOTA Management Team. Usually found on 40m or 20m on a summit somewhere
@ian I must admit I look at some requests for access to the SOTA API and go "this will be unmaintained in about 6 weeks time.". People (myself included) massively underestimate the time needed to support something as soon as other users are involved.
(The other 40% of requests are "I am vibe coding and app to do X, I need access to the API", followed by me saying "Are you aware of Y, Z, P, Q and R apps that all do exactly what you want?" with the usual incredulous response)
Pretty nice day for some SOTA in the Sonoran Desert. Did W7A/YU-123, which I'm calling Jester Peak after the name of the trail.
@tsherrygeo I refuse to judge given some of the stupid shit I have pushed live for SOTA. But I honestly can't think of a reason why they would enforce that.
@G8RKE I think in theory the folding is supposed to increase the impedance by 4x, so a proper free space dipole at 72 ohms will become 288 ohms or near enough to 300 ohms. Of course, hams think in 50 ohms, so that's where the 200 ohms comes from, but in practice I suspect it's going to depend on the spacing between the dipole elements, the size of the element, the radius of curvature, anything surrounding it, the way it's been constructed etc, particularly at VHF and above
@wezm I wondered if you had ever made it to the second peak. Looks a lot of down before you head back up.
@IU1KGS patiently? 😀
@wezm yeah, I suspect it's a snow thing, but the other side of that is basically a cliff
Annual New Year's tradition of climbing a #SOTA summit and seeing in the UTC new year for double points. This year I went to Mount Buller and made a bunch of S2S contacts on 40 metres, to ACT, NSW, Tasmania, South Australia and of course Victoria. After the new year rollover, also participated in the 2m/70cm challenge, with 5 contacts on 2m SSB and 1 on 70cm SSB, vertically polarised via a slim Jim for 2m. Worked #fedihams @vk3xe and @vk3kr for added measure.
@literatesavant I had a quick tune around 20m and couldn't hear any ZL so stuck with 40 as the money band. Probably should have spotted on 20 at some point but I went to 2m instead.
@mike_k It's always fun watching an engineer discover the meaning of the words "Forward Looking Statement" the hard way
@scott my personal best was watching my boss submit a $20,000 expense claim one of our team members had racked up (downloading multiple 64G kernel dumps over mobile data in the mid-2000s) and having the phone ring *15 seconds* later being our VP questioning just what the (insert colourful and novel swear words) we were doing. He was pleased to know we had negotiated it down from $30,000. All dollars quoted are of the Australian peso variety. Employee remained an employee -dedicated not dumb
@Gina I am based out of Melbourne, several folks have mentioned @kattekrab who knows everyone who is anyone and a few of us that aren't.
Sydney is primarily a sales office, though, so lower concentration of tech folks than other places.
@ian this is the way.
@KZ4LN sotadata is the database. All except the reflector use SSO so signing up to any signs up to all. The reflector is different for reasons. Software mainly 😀
@KZ4LN let me know if you have any issues with it, given it's my system.
@jamesb All highly plausible except the idea that there's a disease someone on 80m doesn't know about.
@ian I have definitely noticed a EU spike in SOTA spots but it usually stays solid until NA go to bed, such that I can often do production work on the servers during APAC hours and not care about potential brief outages (although my personal pride means I do)
If I integrate my signal over a long enough timeline, like say, 150 years, the latter part is not likely to have much transmitter-on time because I will be dead. So it'll trend towards zero as we approach the heat death of the universe.
