Spotting not working

Ragchew
1

I did a SOTA/POTA activation a few days ago. I had spotty cell service. I tried to spot myself using Ham2K. I made sure my cell phone had service at the time of my spot. My spots would never go out. I am using the latest October 2024 release.

2

Did it fail to spot SOTA and POTA, or just one?

3

I did not see a spot in either SOTA Watch or POTA Spots.

I came home after and look at both.

4

While you may have had cell phone voice and SMS service, are you sure that you had data service? Up in the Alps I have seen that before - SMS is usually available but 4G-LTE/5G sometimes not.

73 Ed DD5LP.

5

We might want to add some better error messages, to let the user know when spotting has failed.

2 Likes
6

I could send a spot via SOTA watch so I am pretty sure I had service. I will test again on the next outing.

Thanks
Kent
N6WT

7

I did several activations and realized a few things that arent perfect with spotting:

  • There is no feedback on success/fail of the spotting task
  • I often activate where cell coverage is bad. Not knowing if the spot went through makes it unusable unfortunately.
  • When cell coverage is solid, it takes up to a few minutes before it shows on sotawatch, this does not happen on sotl.as for instance.
  • Sometimes the spot never shows up on the platforms (while using the October release), even with good cell coverage. Again, some feedback on success/fail of spot would change everything.

Thanks for the amazing software, just a few tweaks away from perfection!
VA2NM

8

Yeah, we need better ways to report success and more importantly any errors when spotting.

Not easy, with the limited real estate on a phone screen, but we should be able to figure something out.