High-level PN&R awards framework

Awards
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I’ve been thinking about how an awards system would function. The last thing I want to do is to write the matching code for things like the POTA operator-to-operator awards, or hunter awards. POTA has a fairly robust system for those and I don’t think we want to recreate that.

So, with matching out, the awards are individual and we’ll trust the submitter to give us an accurate log. The intent is to use PoLo’s ADIF format.

That’s really the only parameter that is set. I think awards should be fun and moderately difficult to obtain, and we can think outside the box here since we are creating a program from scratch.

BTW I managed the awards program at 73 Magazine during my time there as Editor, and I was involved in setting up new awards. If you ever owned the wall-sized map showing all the world’s prefixes, that was me and my Managing Editor Chris, took us months to assemble that by hand!

Here’s a running summary of what I am hearing in the threads…

We want awards with some of these properties:

  • Open to everyone: Activators, hunters, and SWLs
  • FUN
  • Achievable but challenging
  • Reset every year
  • Try not to overlap with Mother POTA’s awards
  • Accept ADIF logs and immediately announce new awards
  • Are individual awards, no log matching
  • Rely on the integrity of the submitter
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In the context of taking a step back and trying to look at the bigger picture, I think the ‘endorsements’ program at PODXS070 is outstanding. It’s a wide range of goals. It’s entirely honor system, although you upload your logs and the system works out what you’e qualified for, and how much progress you’ve made on things. I can’t vouch for design intent, but I’ve had worlds of fun chasing those endorsements, they establish a program where you feel every single QSO you make is progress forward on something, and the entire membership is a community that supports and encourages each other’s progress.

Take a look: Available Endorsements

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Thats is EXACTLY the fun sort of thing I’d love to offer, those endorsements are a riot! POTA.app already covers the basic WAS and QSO counting stuff, ours should complement those but also be challenging enough to engage people.

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I’ll pin this post at the top to summarize the thread.

We want awards with some of these properties:

  • Open to everyone: Activators, hunters, and SWLs
  • FUN
  • Achievable but challenging
  • Reset every year
  • Try not to overlap with Mother POTA’s awards
  • Accept ADIF logs and immediately announce new awards
  • Are individual awards, no log matching
  • Rely on the integrity of the submitter
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My PSK31 activity has largely been brushed aside by POTA activations but I still see the PODXS070 mailing list, and there’s a surprising amount of activity that amounts to people taking road trips and stopping in various maidenhead grids to hand out grids to the grid chasers. Again, that’s something that builds community between the field folks and the grid chasing community, with lots of email along the lines of “Who needs grids in northern AZ, and what grids doyou need?”, so that the ‘hunters’ and ‘activators’ can coordinate/sched. It’s an informal but lovely arrangement, and I’d dearly love to see a way for POTA hunters who are yearning to bag parks to connect with activators who might be able to activate that park for them

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Capturing that, it’s important.

Why does it remind me of Craigslist?

YOU: IN US-1234
ME:  ON 40M
FOR: CONNECTIONNNNN
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We could do it here in a category for now. Are people using Hamalert for that sort of thing? Def not the PODXS070 folks sine those are really outside the scope of Hamalert, but I do think it has POTA reference capability.

But I think what you mean is more like a hunter saying ‘Hey I need US-1234’ an an activator arranging a sked based on that.

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What other people do, I have no clue. For the parks I’m interested in, I use Hamalerts. There are perhaps a half dozen parks where I’m interested.

That solves part of the problem but not all of it. If I’m a hunter, and I want someone to go and do a CW activation so I can add a park to my ‘collection’, at this point I have to look at the activator list for that park, or some park proximate, and reach out to contact those hams.

What I had in mind was more along the lines of a registry. My home is in CN97bq, so I might indicate willingness to try to activate parks in CN96, CN97, CN98. If I’m planning a rove into, say, CN88, I could register that I’ll be there certain dates. Hunters could register either areas of interest, or perhaps particular parks. When a match happens, both parties get a notification.

I’m using Maidenhead grids to identify areas mostly because there are a lot of grid hunters out there, many grids are rare, and POTA/SOTA activators obviously are not averse to going someplace, setting up, and operating.

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