To continue the discussion on the original forum post from a software slant I am very aware of the difficulty faced by activators who want to self spot from a mobile phone. The benchmark standard for this kind of functionality is the Bogdan’s excellent SOTA Spotter Application for Android devices.
The WOTA site was developed before frameworks embraced multiple devices and therefore is painful to navigate around using a mobile phone. Whilst I don’t have the skills to create an App I am planning on providing a dedicated spotting and alerting page developed with a modern framework such as Bootstrap which will provide a streamlined mechanism for spotting and alerting from a phone or other non-desktop device.
Thanks for considering an improved spotting scheme. Also, on behalf of WOTA activators, chasers and watchers, thanks for your continuing [largely unsung] maintenance of the SOTA website.
hi mark i don’t have a smart phone or even pretend to understand what goes in to maintaining the WOTA website but i am sure that like me every one appreciates the work you have put in to make it what it is
keep up the good work
73 and happy new year to all
2e0ldf
Andy @G8CPZ has enquired about an SMS gateway which is the other option available to SOTA activators, it can certainly be handy when mobile phone signals are either sketchy or confused. I’ll look into what is required, I suspect I have all the hardware and it would be a software project to get it sorted.
Until this summer, when my wife got me a reconditioned iPhone 5S, I had a smartphone but with a small screen. However, it was fine for composing and sending SMS text messages. I’ve used the UK SOTA SMS spotting service for years for self-spotting from SOTA summits and it’s quick and easy. You send a short text to a dedicated UK phone number. If WOTA had something similar, I think one could self-spot from any phone assuming you have reception.
In case you [or other readers] are unfamiliar with how it works, here’s an example spotting message:
! G LD058 145.500 FM Calling CQ now
! means use my callsign as registered - the rest is self explanatory.