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 together by three rarity multipliers - the biome, the band, and the mode it was worked on. Working the same operator again on a different band or mode still counts as a new, points-earning contact - but working them again on the same band and mode doesn't earn a second helping of points. Only the earliest of those repeats counts; the rest don't appear as separate contacts at all.
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 its log is first uploaded, so your score doesn't change retroactively if that biome's rarity shifts later.
The band and mode each contact was worked on carry their own rarity multipliers too - 1x, 1.25x or 1.5x, based on how often each has been logged across every activation, refreshed monthly the same way as biome rarity. Fewer tiers than biome rarity, since there are only a couple of dozen bands and modes to rank rather than thousands of biomes.
Each contact's band and mode multipliers are locked in the moment its log is uploaded, same as biome rarity. See the current tiers on the Band/Mode Rarity page (also linked from the bottom of the sidebar) to plan an activation around the rarer end.
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 15, 40 and 100 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.
The Hunter Points track is measured against your total hunter points instead - the sum of every contact's points (biome x band x mode multiplier) across everything you've been worked at, per QSO rather than per activation. A point total climbs faster than a plain activation count, so this track has its own, higher tier thresholds - 10, 100, 200, and upward - rather than reusing Total Hunted's.
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.