I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on for the Summits on the Air community: SOTA Magic, a WordPress plugin designed specifically for SOTA activators. Whether you just finished a grueling hike or a quick local activation, SOTA Magic helps you tell the full story of your activation without having to put in all the work.

With the new “SOTA DATA” block in the editor tool, you can easily upload your GPS track and SOTA formatted CSV logs to create a beautiful, interactive summary of your activation.

Why you’ll love it:

• Interactive Contact Maps: Automatically plots your QSOs on a map using your QRZ credentials and SOTA API data.
• S2S Highlighting: Automatically detects and spotlights those hard-earned Summit-to-Summit contacts.
• Fully Responsive: Your contact tables include horizontal scrolling to ensure they look great on everything from a desktop to a smartphone.
• Complete Customization: Match the colors, fonts, and transparency to your personal blog theme with ease.

A Note on Mapping: To provide the best possible experience for visualizing your hike, SOTA Magic works alongside the popular WP GPX Maps plugin. By pairing these two tools, SOTA Magic can overlay your radio contacts and summit data right alongside your actual GPS trekking path for a complete “Magic” view of your activation.

Stop posting plain text logs and start showing off the true scale of your activations. SOTA Magic is built by an activator, for activators.

This is what you see on the blog post editor page. You simply point it to or upload GPX and CSV data. SOTA MAGIC waves its wand and does the rest. See below. Everything in the tan box below is auto generated.

DOWNLOAD Version .522 beta

Change-log:

Version .522 – Activation Time stat now uses the Activation.Zone API (Thank you to N6ARA) to query actual activation zone (AZ) GPS coordinates and determine time within the AZ. Included option debug window for admin users.

Version .510 – Altered GPX statistics to include break times in hike total time, and then to exclude stationary time with the defined ‘activation zone’ parameter. This is a radius calculation for simplification, not an elevation calculation which would prove more complex. Messaging N6ARA to ask if his https://Activation.Zone site has an API we could query

Version .509 Beta – Initial release

SAMPLE below of reported data using only GPX and SOTA CSV file: