NOTA is an amateur radio award scheme for activating and hunting natural biomes across the UK-family callsign area - woodland, water, sand, grassland and summits.
You're considered to be at a biome when you're within 30 metres of its boundary (or, for a point-type biome like a summit, within 30 metres of the point itself). Log your contacts from there and upload the log afterwards to record the activation.
If you return to the same biome later in the same UTC day and upload a separate log, it's merged with any earlier one from that day into a single activation - it doesn't count as a second one.
Each contact is worth 1 point, multiplied by the biome's rarity multiplier for that activation. Working the same operator again on a different band or mode still counts as a new, points-earning contact.
Every biome carries a rarity multiplier between 1x and 2x, based on how many times it's ever been activated, ranked against every other biome. This is 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 your score doesn't change retroactively if that biome's rarity shifts later.
Three milestone tracks - Total Activations, Silver Activations, and Gold Activations - share the same tier thresholds: 1, 10, 20, 40, and upward. Bronze, Silver and Gold badges are awarded per activation at 10, 25 and 75 points. The tracks aren't rebalanced to take equal effort - Gold Activations are naturally rarer than any activation at all, so the higher Gold/Silver tiers are a deliberately longer chase.
Awards are checked and granted automatically on every log upload, based on your totals across all activations - there's no separate claim step.
An award can also carry extra endorsement tags for meeting a stricter condition - for example, a biome-type endorsement if enough of the qualifying activations were all the same biome type (Woodland, Water, Sand, Air or Grassland). A single award can carry several independent endorsements at once.
The Total Hunted track uses the same tiers and biome endorsements as the activator tracks, but counts distinct activations you were worked at - your callsign appearing in someone else's uploaded log - rather than ones you activated yourself. It's checked whenever a contact gets newly tied to your callsign, whether that's on the activator's log upload, or retroactively at signup if the contact was logged before you joined.
Awarded to both operators when a contact is mutually confirmed - you logged working them, and they separately logged working you, proving you were both activating at the same time. It doesn't count until the second of the two logs is uploaded, and can only ever be discovered by a fresh log upload from either side.
Matching requires the same band, the same mode, and QSO times within 5 minutes of each other. Its endorsements are stricter than the other tracks' - a "Water to Water" endorsement, for example, only fires when both operators were in a Water biome, not just one of them.