Got this email from the national ham radio guild (Amateur Radio Relay League - just celebrated their 100th birthday!):
North America SOTA Activity Weekend 2015 is a casual event involving tiny battery-powered radios on mountain summits. It is not a contest but is intended to introduce "Summits on the Air" to newcomers with home stations who try to work summit operators during one or two days. There are no rules regarding power levels, modes or number of bands worked, but please be courteous when more than one station is trying to talk to a SOTA operator on a summit. The SOTA operators have just climbed mountains as high as 14,000 feet; they use low power; and they don't receive on split frequencies.
Check SOTAWATCH.org to spot who is on which mountain. Summits are numbered, and you can hover your cursor over the number to see the name and point value for each summit. Expect the website to show activity near 7.032, 7.185, 10.110, 14.342, 18.095, 18.155, 21.350, 24.905, 24.955, 28.420, 146.52, 446.00, and 61 Khz up from the bottom of 20, 15 and 10 meters CW. Participants are invited to collect points toward certificates and trophies offered by the thirteen-year-old international SOTA group (SOTA.org.UK). As we learned in past years, this is a barrel of fun for both hill climbers and home operators. See you then.
There are a couple nearby peaks that are registered in the SOTA database. There is even a Pacific Northwest SOTA group. I am more of a base-station/large battery/high power kinda guy right now but this would be a lot of fun down the road. There is some excellent engineering going into lightweight stations and antennas.
Just spent the last couple hours surfing through some of these websites and thinking about operating. I want to go up to Artist Point but it is not a mountaintop and therefore, not in the SOTA database. Fortunately, many mountaintops also feature cell-phone towers and getting permission/keys to visit them is pretty straightforward if you approach the right people.
