Direction of POTA News & Reviews

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I thought I’d put this out here to be clear about where I plan to take PN&R.

The goal is to make POTA News & Reviews the hub for POTA. There isn’t one, and I think we will benefit as a community from the effort. Everything I’m doing around the forums, the POTAmap, newsletters, and so on is to support that goal.

I’ll also say that a print, subscription-based periodical magazine is a big part of this vision. As many of you know (because I won’t stop saying it LOL), I was Editor-In-Chief at 73 Magazine, working for Wayne Green W2NSD/1. I also had a hand in at inCider Magazine, a sister publication. I absolutely fell in love with magazine work. We had four big rags then, CQ, 73, ham radio, and of course QST and there was plenty of room for all of us. I truly believe that there’s a market for a print magazine in the POTA space.

I’m not hiding it: PN&R is my effort to build out a media property. It can’t be as big as Wayne’s, the space just isn’t that large, but today I can leverage a lot of automation that I couldn’t back then, and that helps costs down. We didn’t have the Web then, so things look a little different.

I think it is cool that there are several of you who have taken up this idea and are running with it. You guys are going to end up defining some interesting things. When I said I’m going to build out a POTA awards program that we all like, I meant it, and I intend to launch in January, and you folks are literally helping define what those awards are, maybe for quite some time.

Anyway, that’ what’s on my mind right now. If it seems like I’m flogging PN&R in every chanel you visit, it’s because I am, and I’ll keep doing it until we hit critical mass, which is close…

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I think that to build the sort of effort you’re envisioning you’re going to need some sort of YouTube presence. There’s lots of field radio/POTA stuff there now, the trick would be to differentiate what you do from Tom Witherspoon style “here’s my pota activation in real time” along with the lightly edited similar content (e.g. Aaron Bowman W4ARB and Evan Thorsen) as well as the more generic ham radio content.

I’ve no experience at all in this domain but I would suggest some combined audio podcast/streamed video roundtable thing, akin to the wonderful Ham Radio Workbench but perhaps more focused on sharing POTA experiences.

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YouTube is in the works, but mainly for the things like a demonstration of using PQL for park research. To be honest I don’t watch the YouTube content, I just never found it engaging, especially the ‘watch me activate’ content. My understanding is that most of the YT content is ‘push’ with very little interaction.

However, I do plan on launching a monthly Zoom conference at the end of November. I need to figure out the right time for it, I’m leaning toward Saturday evenings, late enough for the west coast crew. Gonna call it the POTA Campfire. That is intended to be interactive.

A challenge that I have is that do POTA my way, so I need to keep in mind that there are LOTS of ways to POTA, and PN&R needs to support them all. You won’t see any reviews of parking lots on PN&R right now because I am a hiker, but if we’re being honest, that kind of content has a place on the front page, too.

I’m hoping that being transparent about what I’m up to and engaging the POTA community as co-creators, we’ll end up with a place that everyone can gather and feel welcome.

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LOL a lot of this topic is going to be me woking things out in my head in real time.

So in terms of engaging the community, the closest thing we ave right now is Discord. I love the conversations there. BUT they are somewhat ephemeral, so if last Tuesday we were talking about some antenna gizmo, it’s probably going to be hard to go back and find that.

QRZ is on the other end, it’s just really static. The forums devoted to POTA get some activity, but not a lot, and frankly a third of it is me. It feels like a place where POTA is included but not really featured.

This place, then, should sit in between. We want the nearness and conversational aspect of Discord but also a record of things in a format that’s easy to digest. And this is the place people should come when they want a hit of POTA.

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The diversity of ways to play the POTA game is a) fascinating, and b) key to the entire scheme. Hunters, chasing whatever goal they decide on, need activators regardless of whether they’re a full blown field day style setup with easy-ups and generators or a ham in the woods, sitting on a rock with a peerie QRP CW only rig and an EFHW throw into a tree. And of course every activator needs hunters, regardless what the hunter’s motivations are.

Some activators want to go to a nice spot, set up, and run for many hours. Some prefer to set up, make their 10-12, and move on to the next park, or even head home. Some want to hit 20 parks in a day, some want to do one activation a month. Everyone is putting fun into the pot, and taking a bit of fun out.

And the beauty of it is that it’s so sustained. It goes on and on.

If you want this pota.review thing to grow, you need to figure out ways to offer content and community to the entire spectrum.

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I understand where you are going with this Perry, but please remember That POTA has grown out of being US Based and is massively increasing worldwide. (at my last count the UK has close to 6000 parks and still growing). If you want input from Activators/Hunters you will need to provide access to worldwide users that are increasing rapidly. I have many chats with Ki2D about timing his live YouTube sessions to try to include east of the US , at least a couple of times??

Cheers Ant

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The international aspect is large on my mind. I’ll talk to Sebastian and see what he came up with in terms of timing. I’d like to have the first one this month (November), so it’ll likely be that we’ll just pick the time and see who can make it.

As I start to move PN&R more toward a magazine format, one thing that’s on the list is an International desk. At 73 I started the International column and hired correspondents in several parts of the world to supply activity reports each month. It feels like that can be replicated here, maybe not with formal foreign correspondents but certainly with an eye toward covering the entire world, not just the USA. I had no idea that there was much POTA activity in China, for example – I’m hoping to recruit Bing to provide periodic reports.

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Man that is the challenge right now. Because I’m bootstrapping this, 90% of the content is by me, and it reflects the way I do POTA. You and my current authors are doing a really great job, but it’s still mostly me.

Getting people to write anything is tough. I’ve lowered the bar a few times now, to the point where I’m just accepting stories by email in any format. At some point we’ll hit a critical mass where interest in contributing picks up rapidly, but we’re not there yet.

If anyone has thoughts on what places to promote PN&R exist, I’m all ears. I’ve avoided Facebook since the beginning but my guess is that I’ll need to create an account there. QRZ seems pretty dead. Maybe QRPer, but there’s some competition there.

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I have added a link on my QRZ page, I have noticed especially in Europe that if you put a spot on POTA your QRZ lookup figures increase by at least 30 or so ?

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Just a program note, I’m migrating the POTA News & Reviews properties to POTA.NEWS. I spun up pota.review at a time that I thought PN&R was just about site reviews, but it seems we’re moving more toward that being just a part of the overall operation.

Plus, perry@pota.news is easier to remember… with .review you have to recall whether it is .review or .reviews (it’s .review but the site name is ReviewS).

I also own pota.life, which I grabbed because there’s alway that plan to develop a print magazine, which I’m calling POTA Life in my planning docs.

There shouldn’t be too much disruption as pota.review will continue to work, aliased to pota.news. New users will see pota.news. I am now using pota.news rather than pota.review for email correspondence. It’s much easier to o this now when we have 100 daily visitors rather than next year when it is at 1000.

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Migration to the pota.news domain is complete, might be one or two straggler settings.

One gotcha that I didn’t avoid due to the effort was that the POTAmap now lives on https://pota.news/potamap, and the domain switch means you’ll need to reload your activations CSV from pota.app, just once.

[update] The logs look pretty clean after 24 hours. One bug against POTAmap for hardcoding the old domain, but it isn’t critical.