Welcome to Beaches On The Air - BOTA

Aims and Scope

Beaches On The Air is an award scheme for radio amateurs that promotes portable operation from beaches.

Participants

We have rolls of honour and awards for activators (those who operate from the beaches), chasers (those who contact them from home or elsewhere), and sponsors (those who sponsor the activations in which activators and chasers participate).

Only individuals may hold accounts and participate in Beaches On The Air. It is possible to use a collective radioclub station or callsign during an activation, but individual participants must log their own personal activity independently on our web under their own accounts.

Beaches

You can participate from any beach, country or region around the world.

We define a beach as a strip of land on a shore covered by sand or pebbles created as a result of tides or waves.

The activation zone of a beach includes all the area surrounding the beach. You needn't be on the sand but can even operate from a bench on a promenade, from your car parked by the beach, or even from a hotel room or your beach house, as long as there is not a road between you and the beach.

Our programme currently lists more than 30,000 beaches, often drawn from official sources, such as environmental protection agencies, but we constantly update these lists by adding new beaches as they get activated.

You may activate an unlisted beach, which may be added to our system later on. This will not affect your operation at all, as we don't rely on beach references but activation references.

Activations

You may activate the same beach as many times as you wish, on different calendar days. The separation between one day and the next is defined by overnight sleep between activities.

Each activation has got its own stable activation reference that is generated at the time of its announcement, represented by a four-character alphanumeric code. Activators are encouraged to share this code during activations, which facilitates the identification of the activation by chasers. Failing this code, chasers can still try to identify the activation by activator callsign, date and beach name or reference. The 4-character activation code simply makes things easier.

There is not a minimum number of QSOs nor a fixed number of points per activation. The number of points is determined by the number of chaser reports that the activation receives on our website, multiplied by the number of sponsorships.

Reporting

Activators must create a reference for their activation, ideally, but not strictly necessarily, before the activation takes place.

Activators are not required to submit logs of their activations.

Only chasers are required to submit chaser reports of the activations in which they participate for points to be assigned.