SOTA — Summits On The Air

Why this is here

If you activate parks, you have probably already stood inside a qualifying SOTA summit's activation zone without knowing it. Plenty of summits sit inside state and national parks. The gear isn't the barrier. If you own a portable POTA kit, you own a SOTA kit. The barrier is that SOTA's rules are genuinely stricter, and nobody explains which ones.

This is the whole reason SOTA feels harder than POTA. It isn't the hiking — it's four rules that don't exist in POTA.

You don't have to stand on the exact high point. You have to be within the activation zone — the area within 25 vertical metres (about 83 feet) below the summit. That's vertical, not horizontal. On a broad summit the zone can be a large, comfortable area with trees and somewhere to sit. On a sharp peak it's small. It's a genuinely useful allowance: you can often drop just off the top out of the wind and still be legal.

• Contacts with other stations inside the same activation zone don't count
• Your whole station must be in the zone, same principle as POTA's park boundary
• The zone is defined by elevation, so a contour line on a map is your friend

• Four QSOs qualify an activation for points. Each must be a different station, with callsigns and signal reports exchanged
• Summits are worth 1 to 10 points depending on height and remoteness. A drive-up hill might be 1; a serious mountain 10
• Chasers get points for working an activator — but only one QSO per summit per UTC day counts
• Summit-to-summit (S2S) contacts are tracked separately and are one of the more enjoyable parts of the program
• Some associations award seasonal bonus points for winter activations

• Summits are listed in the SOTA database with a reference like W4G/NG-001 — association, region, number
• Each association publishes an Association Reference Manual (ARM) with its own summit list, elevation criteria and any local rules
• ⭐ Cross-check against the POTA park list. A summit inside a park means one trip, two programs
• Elevation and prominence criteria vary by association — the ARM is authoritative, not general advice

1. Create an account on the SOTA database and read your association's ARM
2. Pick a low-point, easy-access summit close to home — ideally one that's also a POTA park
3. Check the access: where you can park, and how far the non-motorised portion is
4. Pack your existing portable kit. Battery power only — leave anything that plugs in
5. Walk into the activation zone. Within 25 vertical metres of the top
6. Spot yourself, make four contacts, and log them
7. Submit your activation to the SOTA database

• Your portable POTA setup is a SOTA setup. Radio, battery, wire antenna, throw line
• The only hard requirement is that power is portable — batteries or solar
• Weight matters more than it does at a picnic table, so this is where QRP and lighter antennas start to make sense
• On a summit a tree can replace the mast entirely, saving significant weight
• Everything in the POTA Field Safety module applies, plus the obvious: weather changes faster with elevation, and the walk out is in the dark if you overstay

Official sources

Rules summarised August 2026 from the SOTA General Rules and association documentation. Summit lists, point values and elevation criteria are set per-association and change — check your ARM and the summit's database entry before relying on anything here.