| 1) |
To promote international friendship through Amateur Radio. |
| 2) |
To encourage greater participation in Scottish Island hunting, and
activation, by stations outwith the UK and EIRE, including those outwith traditional
European boundaries. |
| 3) |
To reduce the cost of participation in such a programme to a level more
affordable by a greater number of participants. |
| 4) |
To build on the awareness of our Scottish Islands, an awareness already
developed by other island award programmes, such as those mentioned on our web-page
titles. |
| 5) |
To encourage activators to be ambassadors for Amateur Radio and for
Scotland, in their negotiations (whenever appropriate) with island owners or their
appointed representatives. |
| 6) |
To encourage all those involved (whether hunters or activators) to
maintain the credibility of the programme by participating at all times with honesty and
integrity. |
| 7) |
To assist intending activators by providing, on request and where
available, information regarding ownership, transport, landing and operating sites, useful
contacts etc. |
| 8) |
To provide modest financial or practical assistance for activator
participation in the SCOTIA programme, assuming the programme eventually generates
sufficient surplus funds to allow this. |
| 9) |
To recognise activators' efforts by offering, free of charge, a SCOTIA
"activator" certificate, similar to (but clearly distinguishable from) that
issued to island hunters. |
| 10) |
To encourage some competitive spirit, by indicating on the certificate and
on the web-site, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd positions in each country (in practice, we have, to
date, indicated national position in all cases). |
| 11) |
To use our web-site as the primary source of information on the SCOTIA,
but to encourage the use of all other appropriate bodies such as national amateur radio
societies, DX news bulletins etc., as a means of disseminating relevant information. |
| 12) |
To encourage activators to make greater use of low power portable
equipment and power supplies, and to seek greater efficiency by experimentation with
portable antennas. |
| 13) |
To encourage resident island operators to participate in the SCOTIA
programme by activating their own island and/or others in the same island group, or indeed
other island groups. |
| 14) |
To encourage the use of QRP operation by island hunters by noting
"QRP" on the certificate. (For the purposes of the SCOTIA, "QRP " is
defined to be less than or equal to 10dBW PEP output). |
| 15) |
To discourage the use of unnecessary high power (for the purposes of the
SCOTIA programme, 'pep' output power in excess of 20dBW for UK and EIRE stations
and 26dBW for others would, under average conditions and depending on the band, be
considered unnecessarily high). We would wish to encourage friendly competition based on
operating skill, rather than on brute force! |
| 16) |
To discourage the current practice wherein expedition stations give
everybody standard "5 by 9" reports. This is often done regardless of
readability or signal strength. Not only do QRP stations rely on accurate reports
as a means of judging the efficiency of their station, but such reports can also be of
interest to others, perhaps from a propagation or a competitive point of view. Likewise,
accurate reports received would help the SCOTIA Activator assess the performance of their
station. |
| 17) |
To recognise the increasing "mobility" of island hunters in
their daily lives, by giving accreditation for island points scored either from the home
QTH or while temporarily /M or /P with the same call-sign, or prefixed/suffixed in
accordance with the CEPT or similar reciprocal operating agreement.(This also applies to
SWLs).
It has further been decided to extend this principle to allow all participants to continue
with their award programme, even if they are either temporarily or permanently relocated
to another DXCC entity. The applicant should specify the call-sign under which most
QSOs/stations heard occurred. This will be the call-sign appearing on the certificate. A
separate application form, using the appropriate points scoring system, should be used for
each call-sign. |