As the Idaho SOTA Association Manager, I wanted to the let pnwSOTA community know about upcoming changes in the Idaho Summit list effective 0000 UTC July 1. The work behind these changes was a strong collaboration between Rob/AE7AP the Montana Association Manager and myself. Rob deserved credit for doing most of the hard work on the data gathering and analysis.
These changes are driven by aligning the Idaho and Montana summit lists with the worldwide SOTA standard of 150 meters of prominence. Previously, these summit lists were based on 500 feet of prominence. 150 meters is closer to 492 feet, so 8 feet less prominence is used in creating these new list. This change added a surprising number of new summits to our lists. Additionally, we used this opportunity to clean up the Idaho summit list in several areas. Many summit names were updated to the current ListsofJohn © database. Minor changes in elevation and prominence were updated in the database. In some cases, errors in the original database have resulted in summits being deleted. If you happened to have activated one of these, don’t worry, your activation is still valid and will be grandfathered in. In some cases, re-evaluation of the summit data resulted in moving the Lat/Lon location of the summit. Within the SOTA system the way to handle this is to delete the previous Summit Reference and create a new Summit Reference at the new location. A couple of examples are Snowbank Mountain and Heyburn Mountain. All the changes are accounted for in updates to the W7I Database and Association Reference Manual that are effective 1 July 2019 at 0000 UTC. You should be able to find them online at the SOTA websites soon. Or, if you are interested, I will e-mail you a copy of the ARM if you ask. In the meantime, I uploaded to this site two PDF’s with the key changes of this update effort. One shows the summits being deleted and the other the summits being added.
Scott Tuthill/K7ZO
Idaho Association Manager