SOTA Spotter

Bogdan Lazanu

About this app

SOTA Spotter is a simple application that retrieves spots from sotawatch.sota.org.uk and displays them in an easy to read manner.

Summits on the Air (SOTA) is an award scheme for radio amateurs and shortwave listeners that encourages portable operation in mountainous areas. You can learn more about it at https://www.sota.org.uk/

Main features:

* Sends spots - via internet or via SMS (useful on summits where cell coverage is not good enough for reliable internet traffic)
* Sends alerts (planned activations)
* Retrieves spots/alerts
* Map of nearby summits
* Spot filtering (by band, mode, call sign, association, region and summit)
* Notifications (vibrations, ringtone, LED and read aloud)

Ratings and reviews

This app was great, but became a lot more frustrating since the big redesign. First of all, I was unable to submit spots with the Internet because it did not make it clear that it switched from sotawatch2 to sotawatch3 which uses completely different credentials. Once I realized that, I was able to fix it and submit spots after being without that feature for a month. The more pressing issue, however, is that it only seems to show very recent spots, like 30 minutes or less. This means the screen is nearly always blank now. It used to show spots much farther back, several hours. This should be a configurable setting and I can't find it.

THE go-to app for SOTA fans. The separate Spots & Alerts tab help you keep on top of who's on air, where and what's coming up. The SMS posting option means you can send spots from a hill top with thin GSM coverage - where mobile data doesn't exist. I had a spot of finger trouble when I first installed the app and got excellent and prompt support from Bogdan - incredible service for a free app. All round rating of 10/10.

The app has worked well for me for several years and continues to do so. 100s of spots sent and received from Smartphone. I use the text service provided by MM0FMF within the app or when the mobile signal is sufficient, I use the app directly to spot myself. I've just started experimenting with the filters for receiving activation notifications for the 14 summits I have activated but have not yet chased. Not sure if this works for me when the app is not actually running, but we'll see... I would like the notifications to appear when the app is running in the background if possible, to alert me for a SOTA Complete. 73 de G4OBK Phil

What's new

* Updated the SMS gateways list so that its contents is no longer randomly sorted
* Added an option to copy the SMS text to the clipboard when posting new spots by SMS
* Fixed color theme issue (the text cursor was not visible)
* Other minor UI improvements