Scheme Rules (working notes)
Proximity
- •Within 30m of a biome's boundary counts as being at that biome (for a point-type biome like a summit, within 30m of the point itself).
Contacts & Points
- •Working the same operator again on a different band or mode still counts as a new, points-earning contact.
- •Each contact is worth 1 point, multiplied by the biome's rarity multiplier for that activation.
Rarity & Scoring
- •Every biome gets a rarity multiplier (1x-2x) based on how many times it's ever been activated, ranked against every other biome and refreshed monthly - the fewer activations a biome has, the higher its multiplier.
- •An activation's multiplier is locked in from the biome's rarity at the moment it's first logged, so it doesn't change retroactively if that biome's rarity shifts later.
- •Bronze, Silver and Gold badges are awarded per activation at 10, 25 and 75 points.
Activations
- •If an activator returns to the same biome later in the same UTC day and uploads a separate log, that log is merged with any earlier one from that day/biome into a single activation - not counted as a second activation.
Awards (implemented so far)
- •Three milestone tracks: Total Activations, Silver Activations, Gold Activations - all sharing the same tier thresholds (1, 10, 20, 40, 80, 160).
- •The tracks aren't rebalanced to take equal effort - Gold Activations are naturally rarer than any activation at all, so the same numbers make the higher Gold/Silver tiers a much longer chase on purpose.
- •Checked and granted automatically on every log upload, based on the totals across all of an activator's activations - no separate claim step.
- •Endorsements: an award can carry extra 'sticker' tags earned under a stricter condition - e.g. a biome-type endorsement if enough of the qualifying activations for that award all happen to be the same biome (Woodland, Water, Sand, Air or Grassland). Only tracks explicitly marked endorsable get checked this way.
- •A single award can carry several independent endorsements at once (e.g. Air AND Water both, if the numbers work out) - each is earned separately, not as one combined condition. Future endorsement types (e.g. band) will use the same mechanism.
- •This does not (yet) support a *simultaneous* compound endorsement - i.e. proving the exact same qualifying activations satisfy two conditions at once, rather than each being satisfied independently somewhere in the activator's history.
- •The catalog format (badge art, PDF certificates, etc.) is still undecided - for now, earned awards and their endorsements just show as a plain table on My Awards.
- •First hunter-side track: Total Hunted, same 1/10/20/40/80/160 tiers and biome endorsements as the activator tracks, but counting distinct activations a member was worked at (their callsign showing up in someone else's uploaded log) rather than ones they activated themselves - see My Hunters Log.
- •Checked whenever a contact gets newly tied to a member's callsign - on the activator's log upload, or retroactively at signup if the contact was logged before that member ever joined.
- •Biome to Biome: awarded to both operators when a contact is mutually confirmed - I logged working them, and they separately logged working me - proving both of us were activating at the same time, not just that one of us was. Doesn't count until the second of the two logs is uploaded.
- •Biome to Biome requires each side's log to name the callsign the other actually declared for that QSO (their per-QSO OPERATOR field, or their activation's overall STATION_CALLSIGN if that's all they logged) - not just any callsign on their account. An ordinary Hunted contact still counts under any of an activator's registered callsigns (that side can't be policed), but Biome to Biome can't.
- •Matching also requires the same band, the same mode, and QSO times within 5 minutes of each other, so two unrelated contacts between the same two accounts can't get paired up by mistake.
- •Biome to Biome endorsements are stricter than the other tracks': 'Water to Water' only fires when the mutually-confirmed pair were BOTH in a Water biome, not just that one side was.
- •Because it's keyed off callsigns baked into the log at upload time, a Biome to Biome match can only ever be discovered by a fresh log upload (either side's) - adding a callsign to your account afterward can't retroactively unlock one.