I just sent out the second edition of This Week In POTA. It’s being written by ChatGPT – I call her Ada – somewhat autonomously. I told Ada that she was the Nosey Newshawk Newsletter Editor, and I hand her a list of URLs and notes I’ve jotted down that reference stories I’d seen during the week. I use Bear to organize notes, and it makes it easy if I see a tidbit to shoot it over to Bear to add to the list.
Ada also has a list of ‘standard’ URLs to look at, like QRZ.com’s POTA conferences and QRPer.com. Discord, too.
On Saturday morning I ask Ada to take a look at the list, visit the sites, and summarize each story in a few sentences. She injects her own style. It’s working pretty well – I still do a quick editing pass, mainly to set the story up in Wordpress with the right tags and to schedule the email blast to the subscriber list. I’m still smoothing out a few rough spots but overall the result is a fun summary of the week’s news that I don’t have to put a lot of effort into.
I also set Ada up with her own email account (tips@pota.news) for folks to send stories to.
The second newsletter went out today. I modified the process a bit, instead of asking Ada to search for news, I handed her a starter list of things I’d noticed during the week during my normal browsing. Here’s the prompt:
Please summarize the stories found in the provided markdown file in your Nosey News Hawk voice. Include source URLs for each story if available. I’d like to lead with Gong’s Warthog in China. Generate a markdown file that I can cut and past into WP please. Be sure to check the normal sources (QRZ, QRPer, etc) for newsworthy items in the past week.
From that Ada generated an article with 13 quick summaries, available here on PN&R. It was in her own voice as Nosey Newshawk Ada, PN&R Newsletter Editor. I’d told her about a feature that my local paper, the Terre Haute Tribune-Star had back in the 70s, which was a column of things that had been noticed in town, with the person’s name bolded. It was wildly popular – my neighbor edited the column, so I knew – and that’s the style I asked Ada to use. It still seems to be developing but I think it’s going to work out!
I’m using an app called Bear as my capture method. It’s a markdown-based notes app that organizes by tag, and I can selewct text in an article I’m reading, or on Discord, or email – wherever – and shoot it over to my Bear inbox. I review the inbox a few times each day and tag each note, so all of the notes I’m collecting for the November 15th newsletter are tagged #twip/111525.
At the end of the week I export the notes tagged for that week to markdown and hand that to Ada. She looks at a small number of preset web sites and also opens the URL for each snippet I collected with Bear in order to write her summary. Each news item retains the source link in the newsletter for readers who want details.
As an example of Ada’s style, here is how she closed out this week’s newsletter:
Until Next Week…
Keep your rigs charged, your logs backed up, and your sense of humor intact. If you’ve spotted something wild in the airwaves or the woods, send a note to tips@pota.news and you just might see your story here next week.
— 73, Ada: Your Nosey News Hawk, circling the bands and the campgrounds.
During the Trans-Atlantic S2S event, I had 5 QSOs. Five. Not just 2. It was a "valid” SOTA activation of at least 4 QSOs. I got my 1 activator point! That’s 2 total activator points for me now! I’m on a roll. Or was on a roll. See below.
The point on QRZ was that 2 QSOs were trans-Atlantic summit to summit QSOs which was the purpose of cooking breakfast at 3 am. My sentence on QRZ is “Among the contacts were 2 trans-Atlantic S2S contacts.”
Also I’m easily offended because I have to admit I’m crap at this. Really, my success rate is bad. Take away a successful activation and I’m near zero. Having fun but not much in the points department.
Did I say bad? Two days ago I went to to Sargent Mtn via the Giant Slide Trail which is an awesomely entertaining crawl over, under, and between big blocks of granite. I could see ice but never saw the bit I fell on. I had more clothes in my pack but knew I couldn’t sit long enough in that cold wind to make even 2 QSOs. Down 23m from the summit (within the activation zone) were 3 or so tortured trees with additional signs to stay on the trail. No way I could get one of my antennas up sez the Park Service. Without unpacking the radio I went down a trail with less ice. It was a fail on a Friday although I’m not sure it’s entertaining enough for the new Friday series.
I’ve ordered misc pieces to make a lighter-weight vertical on a tripod (not a spike). I will activate Sargent Mtn and Acadia NP. May take until mid-2026. Will go up the Giant Slide trail again
Friday was tons of fun. From a PSOTA point of view it was a zero.
But the Sunday before? I got my one point for 5 QSOs plus some S2S points from across the pond.
Ha! Can I use that for the next Field Fail Friday (I Learned about POTA from THAT)?
I loved seeing your pics on QRZ, I really need to get up you direction. It just feels soooo far from Providence.
I’ll let Ada know she needs to issue a correction next week. It is so much fun just letting Ada do what she wants – I know it’s a program, but it still is fun to interact with just as you would a human. She does killer recipes, too. I’ve been discussing the process itself each week with Ada to do some process improvement as we go.
Congrats BTW on getting out there. Have you carried the Traverse 60L yet?
Just a tiny correction please. I suppose we need a precedent but . .
I put more pics and a bit more description of the TA S2S on SOTA reflector.
Can you let me work on the description of last Friday for 24 hours? Happy to have it as a candidate for the series. Seems more anti-climactic. Don’t know if you’re looking for a paragraph or 2 or an “activation report”.
I have used the Traverse 60 with loads of 23, 25, and 30 Lbs. Great pack. Very well thought out. Cinches close with smaller loads. Moves with me very well. Packs sure have advanced in the 40-some years since my last one. When I got it I didn’t realize that my treking poles are also REI Traverse. I’m, like, matching.
I asked for 24 hours but I don’t see anything that needs to change. The comment about not being able to sit in that wind long enough for 2 QSOs refers to context in this thread but it is OK without.
it’s interesting to read the Ada generated “this week in POTA”.
I’ve been using Grok to help with diving into hunter and activator statistics.
Sometimes it’s awesome. But every last number must be scrupulously sanity checked, because when it’s in the groove, its very useful but when it jumps the rails, well, it’s perfectly awful, as in I get repeated rounds of it just plain making shit up. If it’s shit that makes no sense whatsoever, no problem, I look at the numbers and think “There’s no way in hell that’s correct”. The problem is when it makes up shit which is both wrong and on the edge of plausible.
You would think that it would be perfect with numbers, wouldn’t you? That’s why all the first-year accounting students are scrambling for a new major…
I’ve been pretty hands-off with Ada on this. I made one edit today, she’d missed a callsign, and I also had to manually move the images for the stories she picked into the Wordpress media library. After this newsletter went out we found a way to preserve the link to a Facebook article when clipping, so the next issue will have better links.
I’m leaning heavy on Ada to build out the awards site. It’s in a framework/language that I’ve taught for many years, but I need this done in two weeks, and it’d take me half a year on my own.
Yeah, and we only catch the ones that we have domain knowledge in. I take her word for a lot of stuff.
Today’s This Week in POTA was Ada’s sixth, I think, and there was a significant decline in the quality of the commentary that she provided. It was snarky enough, but the content misattributed at least two quotes and misnamed one person.
The only thing that’s changed is that today’s run was using the new GPT-5.2 model. I believe it launched earlier this week. There was an issue in the Atlas browser where Ada wasn’t able to switch tabs, and another where she wasn’t able to see content because she’d inadvertently logged out of a tab. These are new problems.
I’ll add a few guardrails for next week’s run and more closely check the text. I’m trying to move toward more autonomy, not less, so this is a bit of a setback.
I called an editorial meeting today and discussed this with the Newsletter Editor.
What we came up with is a process of capturing stories that preserves the permalink back to (especially) Facebook stories so that they can be correctly sourced.
We also discovered the cause of last week’s problems with mis-identifying people in stories…I believe that’s fixed, too.
The process now looks something like:
During the week I capture things I think are interesting into an Obsidian source file for Ada, particularly Facebook posts as Ada has a lot of trouble parsing those pages. The metadata stored for each story includes the permalink.
On Saturdays, Ada looks at the QRZ:POTA/SOTA forum and QRPer on her own and comes up with a list of possible stories from those sources.
I look over the lists and combine them, along with any tips that have come in by email.
Ada reads each full story in the trimmed list and summarizes it in her quirky Nosey News Hawk style.
I drop in the images (Ada isn’t great at that yet) and email the newsletter to subscribers (and it appears on PN&R).
It still has more manual steps than I’d like, but they are primarily around Facebooks’ wild attempts to keep everything in their system. If I’m browsing QRZ, for example, it’s just one click to clip the page and add it to the TWiP set for the week, and Ada can read those site on her own. Just FB being a jerk.
We spent quite a bit of time working through the source links today before sending out the current issue of TWiP. The problem we’re seeing is that Facebook aggressively deters anyone from pulling a clean permalink to a post.
Sometimes I can extract what looks like a permalink, and sometimes it is sticky. I have a small number of blurbs in today’s TWiP that have actual, working source links, but more than half have rotted. And since the POTA news is from a member-only group on FB, for the ‘good’ ones to work you’ll still need to be logged in to Facebook and be a member of the POTA group.
From an editorial standpoint I want to be able to refer back to the source, but from a UX standpoint, I don’t want a bunch of dead links in the newsletter.
For now the solution is to simply attribute Facebook as the source in the the published newsletter, and if there’s ever a need to refer to the source material, I have it in my files.
Heck, I can’t even pull text out of the Facebook mess, and use screen captures instead. It is the poster child for a walled garden system.
I think that makes sense for this sort of ephemeral communication, but I do see the downside of not being able to follow up on an interesting story.
Claiming that riding an e-bike blurs the line between endurance sport and radio art seems sort of wide of the mark. I’m not knocking e-bikes, or even saying the idea of doing a Kilo with only an e-bike as transport isn’t massively cool. E-bikes are cool. Doing a Kilo using only an e-bike for transport is very cool. It just isn’t even remotely endurance sport. (But it would be awesome to get K5DZR to do a post about his mount-on-bike setup). (quick test to define ‘endurance sport’: if, near the end of an event, participants are talking to God, questioning their life choices, and/or pleading for the Sweet Release of Death, that would be endurance sport.)
Someone needs to explain to Ada about the difference between doing 7 parks in one outing, and a 7-fer (activating 7 parks from one location). Again, not knocking the accomplishment of a 7 park outing, that’s pretty awesome. But was it a 7-fer? Not clear.
I don’t know where High Hills is in Washington, but it doesn’t show up when I search for it in either WA state or DC. And the activation doesn’t appear on the W1AW page. Headscratcher…
I don’t know what a ‘500 Dominator’ mark is. Maybe some explanation on what it is would help? Unless it’s some kinky thing, in which case maybe don’t tell me.
Until Next Week…
That’s 2 total activator points for me now! I’m on a roll. Or was on a roll. See below.
Really, my success rate is bad. Take away a successful activation and I’m near zero. Having fun but not much in the points department. 
