The name basically speaks for itself, we’re talking about an app that sends spots to the SOTA cluster; it runs on Android and takes very few resources (about 4.2MB of space when installed). SOTA Spotter was released back in October 2014 by fellow romanian SOTA afficionado Bogdan Lazanu (YO8SAW) and now it went up to version 0.4.56, wich includes spot filtering and visual/audible/vibrating alerts.
Since the weather is awful these days there’s no chance for me to test-drive this app in a real SOTA outing, so I had to just play around with it in closed quarters. My regular SOTA app is Rucksack Radio Tool and here’s a comparison of the two main screens side by side (SOTA Spotter on the right, RRT filtering SSB spots only):
To be honest, I already like SOTA Spotter’s cleaner layout better. The settings tabs are also richer and they don’t clutter the main screen.
Sending a spot is done from a different screen, wich makes sense as you don’t really do that too often. It also remembers previous spot data so you only need to adjust what’s changed.
There are also multiple visual themes you can apply, here’s the screen in the “Holo Dark” theme.
Overall, I think I like it better than Rucksack Radio Tool. However, there is one major feature that will keep RRT my main SOTA app: it shows the nearest SOTA peaks and where / how far they are, wich is extremely useful when hiking.
