THE RULES
📜 The Main Rules
Our plain-words summary (KPC wrote it; it is not official). Read the SOTA General Rules and the W4K (Kentucky) Association Reference Manual before you go.
- Activation zone: you must be within 25 m (about 80 ft) of height below the very top of the summit.
- 1 contact is enough to log an activation; 4 contacts are needed to earn the summit's points. Making more doesn't add points.
- No vehicles: you can't operate from or close to a vehicle, and the trip up has to be on foot (or under your own power). Use legitimate access routes and follow the local land rules.
- Log every contact and upload your log to the SOTA database (sotadata).
- Chasers log their contacts in the SOTA database too, to earn chaser points.
- Points for each summit are in the summit list; some associations add a seasonal bonus. Check the W4K manual for Kentucky's.
- Same ground as a POTA park? A summit inside a POTA park is a different program: you can log both, but that's not a POTA 2-fer. For POTA you must still be inside the park boundary.
Sources: sota.org.uk (General Rules and the W4K Association Reference Manual).
These are short, plain-language summaries to get you started. The program's own rules always win: read the official pages linked here before you go, because rules can change.
KPC is an independent ham radio club. We are not part of Summits on the Air and this is not official SOTA material: the official site is sota.org.uk.