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You can help other SOTA and POTA activators by running your own skimmer (monitoring station) at home. Instructions here. This table shows which hams are hearing (skimming) the most SOTAmat messages from the airwaves… thank them for their help!

These are the operators who are using SOTAmat the most (the people sending SOTAmat commands over HF to be executed, such as a SOTA or POTA activators using SOTAmat for self-spots, etc.): [Note: the author of this software has been removed so as not to skew the results since I do a lot of tests!]

This gives you and idea of what bands to transmit your FT8 message on in order to be heard. In order to have your FT8 message be heard, there has to be a compatible SOTAmat skimmer (monitoring station) listening to that band, be in range, and the band has to propagate sufficiently to the skimmer. NOTE: if you try and use 40 meter FT8 (7.074 MHz) remember that you need to use USB (upper-sideband) even though your radio will try to auto-select LSB (lower sideband) when in Voice mode (using the microphone). If you use a direct-cable connection you can use your radio’s “DATA” mode which will automatically select USB, but for a microphone input you’ll have to force USB and remember to switch back to LSB when you are done:

While the SOTAMAT app generates FT8 messages for 1-way commands, the system can work with ANY protocol that monitoring skimmers report to PSKreporter. If you have a way to send a message such that your callsign and SOTAMAT encoded callsign-suffix (ex. KA2VYS/1234) end up in the PSKreporter database, then that’s all you need! This means you can send SOTAMAT commands using FT8, FT4, JT65, PSK31, RTTY, or any other PSKreporter compatible mode.

The reason I recommend FT8 is that there are so few monitoring skimmers for non-FT8 modes. Years ago there were hundreds of RTTY and PSK31 monitoring skimmers, while today there are just a few. There just isn’t enough redundancy to make sure you get heard.

Note that CW is not a reliable way to send a SOTAMAT message because the most popular CW monitoring skimmer software does not understand callsign suffixes that are not country codes (it does not understand the difference between a suffix as a “locator” and a suffix as an “indicator”). This popular CW skimmer actually changes your indicator-suffix into a locator-suffix before reporting to PSKreporter, and thus it breaks the meaning of the message sent.