SOTA Mapping Project

Lore & Background

The SOTA Mapping Project was created by a small group of radio amateurs who share interests in SOTA, hill walking and mountaineering, mapping, and open source programming. They also maintain a similar site for the Islands on the Air (IOTA) award scheme. The site is built around five main mapping pages, each offering distinct functionality: a main page for viewing and exporting summit data in GPX or KML formats; a Range page for distance-measurement tasks including closed circle, open circle, and road-route searches; and a Tracks page for viewing, drawing, or uploading walking routes to SOTA summits.

Reader's Guide

The SOTA Mapping Project is significant as a dedicated graphical resource for the SOTA awards program, providing mapping information that is directly linked from SOTAWatch Summit pages. Its main page is the most frequently used, allowing users to view associations, regions, and individual summits, and to export data for GPS devices or Google Earth. The Range page offers versatile distance-measurement tools, including a road-route feature that finds summits along a corridor between two points. The Tracks page enables users to view, draw, or import GPX tracks to summits. All mapping pages share common tools: a position tool showing latitude/longitude and Maidenhead Locator with a dynamic grid; an Open Maps option to switch between Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, or Open Cycle Map Normal; and an experimental Day/Night shading feature showing sunrise/sunset terminator. The project's legacy lies in its community-driven development by radio amateurs with practical outdoor and programming skills, and its integration with the broader SOTA ecosystem.

Did You Know?

• The site offers an experimental Day/Night shading feature showing sunrise/sunset terminator, with results that cannot be 100% guaranteed.
• The Range page can find summits within a road-route corridor by defining start and end positions and a search radius.
• Users can import tracks in GPX format recorded with a GPS unit onto the Tracks page.
• The main page is referenced directly by links from each SOTAWatch Summit page.