After my double activation yesterday (which I’ve yet to write up), I bumped into Fraser, MM0EFI of RadioRover YouTube fame, in Tesco. He was asking when I was going to be doing some higher point summits, as mostly I’ve been doing ones near to the house which don’t score that high. There are quite a few in my region. After browsing sotl.as some more, I was curious as to how long it took Fraser to reach Mountain Goat. This is the award you get when you reach 1,000 points.

You can see his activation list on sotl.as, and it’s clear he’s done a lot of summits and a lot of high pointers. However, the question still remained…how long did it take?

I know the SOTA database has an API, as several other sites use it and I’ve seen it mentioned in the reflector, but I hadn’t come across any documentation. Searching around I find this post which gets me started. I work out MM is associationID 03, and then querying https://api-db.sota.org.uk/admin/activator_roll?associationID=03, I can look up Fraser’s UserID.

In the past I’ve used python to query APIs, put the JSON into a pandas dataframe then calculate and plot things from there. A quick way to get going with this is in Google Colaboratory. It’s a free jupyter notebook in which many python packages are already installed and it’s quick to jump in and get going. Unsurprisingly, it now features a LLM AI assistant, where you can just type in what you want and it generates several options of code for you to run and see what happens.

My first prompt (including spelling mistakes but now corrected) was:

retreive JSON from api url: https://api-db.sota.org.uk/admin/activator_log_by_id?year=all&id and create a plot of “Total”

Option #2 of Gemini spat out some commented code, I tweaked the date column name, as it just guessed it was called Date not ActivatorDate, and tah-dah ✨

import requests
import json
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

url = "https://api-db.sota.org.uk/admin/activator_log_by_id?year=all&id="

# Define the ID you want to retrieve data for
activator_id = "46844"

# Construct the full URL
full_url = url + activator_id

# Send the GET request
response = requests.get(full_url)

# Parse the JSON response
data = json.loads(response.text)

# Create a Pandas DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame(data)

# Convert the "ActivationDate" column to datetime
df["ActivationDate"] = pd.to_datetime(df["ActivationDate"])

# Plot the cumulative sum of "Total"
df.plot(x="ActivationDate", y="Total", kind="line", figsize=(10, 6))
plt.title("Cumulative Sum of Total for Activator ID: {}".format(activator_id))
plt.xlabel("Date")
plt.ylabel("Total")
plt.show()

Certainly the trend of a mountain goat! Although I’d say once he reached 1,000 the pressure was off and you can see that gradient relax.

But how long did it take?

The actual question that was asked

So I asked Gemini some more questions and we find the answers:

# prompt: duration in activationdate between start and when total=1000

# Find the first row where Total is greater than or equal to 1000
first_1000_row = df.loc[df["Total"] >= 1000].iloc[0]

# Calculate the duration between the first activation date and the date when Total reached 1000
duration = first_1000_row["ActivationDate"] - df["ActivationDate"].iloc[0]

# Print the duration
print("Duration until Total reached 1000:", duration)

Plus question #2:

# prompt: what row of df has total = 1000

# Find the index of the first row where Total is greater than or equal to 1000
first_1000_row_index = df.loc[df["Total"] >= 1000].index[0]

# Print the index
print("Row index with Total equal to 1000:", first_1000_row_index)

🥁633 days and 172 activations 🎉

I’m at 16 points right now 😅⛰️🐐

Another hill, this time to the south of Aberdeen. The weather was wet and windy in the morning, particularly so inland, so thought I’d stick to the coast. The two options were Strathfinella or Hill of Garvock. Reports of angry cows from Garvock, plus the sheltered nature of the wooded summit of Strathfinella made the decision for me.

Consulting Fraser, MM0EFI, the local SOTA expert, I was going to climb it from the south, following forestry roads and mountain bike paths. Looked to be fairly short route and a quick claim to the top. It’s only a one pointer, so never going to be that far.

The weather was pretty good, breezy but some sun and mild. The route was straightforward- literally. There were a few bikers around who I met just before the turn off to the summit.

I had a chat with some of the mountain bikers but just said I was out for a walk. Too much effort to get into the real reason! They pointed me towards the trig point which was off to the side of the main path. I almost missed it whilst walking along! It’s right in the trees, and reminded me of the portal stones from the Realm of the Enderlings book series!

I set up 2m first and got a guy down in Brechin, unfortunately he was the only 2m QSO. I spent a long time calling and then decided to move to HF.

The summit is a bit of a black spot for mobile reception and I wasn’t prepared for that. I use my phone for 2m spotting and for SOTA spotting or looking up other activators. I’ve signed up and registered for APRS to SOTA, and SOTAMAT, a FT8 spotter, and maybe even a SMS one, but do I know how to use them?!

I eventually managed to spot myself on 40m and got a few contacts. 20m spot did work but no one ever came back to me…even though I’d had a few contacts with other callers.

I managed two S2S contacts in Germany. One was an exchange of 11-31 each way but we managed to get my callsign and SOTA reference communicated.

On the way down I thought about doing Hill of Garvock but I hadn’t packed lunch and still had to get back home. Maybe a double activation next time!

I don’t need much but I do need a reason to get on the air. This can take many forms as I wrote in this blog post some time ago. I see quite a few new hams struggling with the problem of “I got this license but now what?” Operating goals or awards are a fun way to keep focused Continue reading A Reason To Get On The Air→

The post A Reason To Get On The Air appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

A lovely sunny day, and time for another activation. Hopefully better than the last – certainly the weather was better.

Quite a close summit to home, Brimmond Hill overlooks Aberdeen and the airport to the east and then Aberdeenshire to the west. There’s a walk up and over it which is popular with dog walkers, and so I met more people than I usually do on this summit. The hill also features several commercial towers which make a bit of noise on 2m. Usually a pip every so often and then a huge blast of rf that completely wipes anything out, interestingly around the 2m and 70cm calling frequencies but not so bad away from them.

I tried 2m first, with the Slim G on the pole and made a couple of contacts locally. There’s a bench that looks out over Aberdeen that I was going to setup on, but the aforementioned dog walkers came by and sat on the bench, so I decided to move off and find a spot in the heather. MM7RVC recorded me calling at his house somewhere to the west, showing off his pole and slim G – so we got a SG2SG QSO.

For HF I went with the EFHW for 40m, with the 49:1 (keep meaning to write up making that but not got round to it yet! Nothing special mind), setup on the 6m carbon pole. Generally running north-south. The weather was lovely, there was a breeze but it wasn’t too cold, and so for most of the time I tried chasing other summit activators. This worked well, as I ended up with five summit-to-summit (S2S) QSOs across England, German, Austria and Poland. I then put out spots for myself and got a few more contacts.

I think the battery was low in the radio as it was only outputting 5W, not that 10W would’ve made a huge difference, but I still find it impressive what 5W can do.

It was time to pack up, and I thought I’d see if I could catch anyone else on VHF/UHF. There’s a local lunchtime net, although I can never remember if its 12:30, 1 or 1:30pm that it starts. I got my Slim G back out and on the mast and this time I did sit on the bench. The net was going on and after a long over I managed to break in and say hello. We also did a quick QSO on 70cm. I’m not sure if the Slim G is suitable for 70cm. It worked but at what SWR? I should measure it and see. Another couple with their dog came up and wanted to come to the view point but one look of me and they decided to keep going! At this point my HT ran out of battery too!

If I was YouTubing myself, everyone would think it normal! I ended up overtaking the couple walking back to the car. I said “Hi” but no QSL on that contact.

It’s been a few weeks since my last activation and I wanted to go out. I didn’t have much time as I was meant to be sorting out the garage, so I picked a summit close to home, Cairn-Mon-Earn (GM/ES-080).

It’s quite an easy walk following the loggers roads up to the summit. There are multiple towers there for mobile phones and other networks. The local repeater, GB3GN, is also here. The weather was dry, and I had the occasional blue sky, but showers were forecasted.

It was windy too, so I hunkered down by the cairn, however, this probably wasn’t the best place being so close to the towers. I setup my slim G 2m on the mast and called CQ. I didn’t get any response so setup on HF. The ground slopes away with heather and bushes, so I decided just to go for the random wire vertical. It has a 5.5m radiator and 2 counterpoises. I started on 20m, and two stations replied, Spain and Finland. This turned out to be my lot on HF. I tried other bands and calling other stations but no one could hear me. It was a shame as there were several other summits I could hear.

I managed to get MM0EFI on the HT, and so I was at 3 contacts. A SOTA summit needs 4 to activate. It had been about an hour and the rain started to come down heavily. I dashed across to some nearby trees and setup underneath one of them. After trying all the bands I came back to 20m, put out another spot and the same Spanish station came back to me…well at least I knew it wasn’t operator error with the radio or antenna!

This was meant to be a quick activation and I’d now been there for over and hour, and so decided to pack up HF. I could see the TV mast in the clouds and so walked over to get a better look. I then found what would be a great spot to activate (if it wasn’t raining) as it had clear views all around. I thought I might as well call on 2m and see if I could get anyone.

I spoke to Fraser again, MM0EFI, now /M as he was driving to work. We made a contact with his intermediate callsign, 2M0EFI/M, so technically I’d activated the site. However, I was determined to get four different people, and in my next CQ, George, MM0SAX/M, replied.

George was driving up from Glasgow on the A90 and has a radio in his work van. We had a nice chat for about 15 minutes, and that turned my “this has been a waste of time ” attitude into a “that wasn’t so bad ” one!

I enjoy HF and setting up different antenna, but if I could reliably activate with just 2m/70cm I’d love to go up the hillside with just my HT.

It was back down and back home. The kids were soon home from school and the garage didn’t get sorted out. I’ll try again next week…