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@ ZS6BV
2024-11-29 14:21:00
After getting my ham licence in 2013 I found out about SOTA. I was enthusiastic as I have a long history of hiking in the mountains while a scout and then as a Scoutmaster. Now I was going to combine the two yet I immediately encountered a big problem. Very few South African summits were listed on the SOTA database and some of those listed did not even qualify as summits. I enquired of SOTA management and was told that "South Africa is on hold until all the summits are correctly mapped and checked." Only then could the summits be loaded to the database.
Using GIS software and my 1:50000 topographic maps I began mapping summits in my home province Limpopo that qualified according to the SOTA criteria.
An individual prominence of 150m or more was easy to determine. Doing the mapping I found a lot of summits that were obvious, but finding the key col of each summit was more difficult. The older maps in South Africa actually had a lot of the key cols displayed and using my combined methods I proceeded to map summits one by one and add the data to a spreadsheet. Taking approximately 8 minutes to map a summit it took me months to map Limpopo. I missed summits where the summit is spread over a large area and though it qualifies due to a 150m or more prominence it does not look like a summit and these we added later.
I sent my mapping data to OM Andrew VK3ARR in Australia and received a thumbs up as to my data accuracy. I was pleasantly surprised when my Limpopo summits appeared on the SOTA database even though the rest of the country was still not done. I immediately started mapping the next province of Mpumalanga using my manual methods.
Sid Tylor ZS5AYC from Kwazulu - Natal, who became SOTA manager for South Africa, and I had been discussing the processes and he arranged access to online software with automated summit processing where we could just check key col position and all the data per summit was processed much quicker. Frustrating for me was that I could not see what the software was doing and we just checked key cols without knowing where the summit was or its other data.
I completed the remaining Mpumalanga summits using the software access and then completed the Western Cape summits after which Sid and I split the Northern Cape summits between us. The other provinces were processed by various operators including some much appreciated assistance from Australian hams.
A big thank you to all in SOTA management, in South Africa, those that assisted from Australia, as well as SOTA UK, for making it possible for us to enjoy the adventures of SOTA.
Activating Renosterkop ZS/NC-272 in the Northern Cape
