Kevin W1DED posted this update from the POTA Board of Directors on Facebook recently:
Growth of 43% in QSOs in two years.
10,200 unique parks per month? That has to be wildly inflated by n-fers. I wonder if the other numbers are as well. It’d be a rate of 340 uniques per day, not buying it.
If they are calculating n-fers along with the multiple QSOs, then yeah, that is skewed data.
How ever, I see spots on all through the week, so it could average out…but I dont know if it’s that high.
@w7pfb have you seen these numbers, Paul?
My stats from the 2026 activators.json file (the activation leaderboard) say 156,223 activations in 2026. Assuming that activations are uniformly distributed across the year (e.g. assume all cows are spherical and have the connectivity of a torus) that would be ~13K activations a month or ~428/day.
Something is not adding up. I will look when I’m not having a low IQ day.
Yeah, ok, this seems to more or less line up. Remember that Del N2NWK regularly activates a 7-fer. N-fers really distort the statistics.
That said it’s not hard to activate 3 parks in a single day; I just did it today to test out some rove arrangements and some gear I’ve acquired with an eye to doing roves park&bark style to hit some parks some distance from me. If I’m gonna drive 2.5 hours there and then 2.5 back, you can bet I’m gonna amortize that drive time over several parks.
Anyway I don’t see anything in those statistics that fails to pass my blink test. POTA has grown pretty big.
One thing that doesn’t match is the 15.2M QSOs for 2025, my data says 13.6M or something.
But think about the activators who hold the big QSO numbers. They tend to go to the same park over and over, not a unique every day.
It’s true that there are some activators (think WB0RLJ) who have big QSO numbers doing essentially one or maybe two activations a day.
That certainly skews the QSO statistics but has little impact on the activation numbers.
It would be really nice to be able to disentangle the effect of N-fers from the data. As you know from your N-ference engine it’s not simple. There are several parks in WA that the map lists as possible N-fers and they’re not - it’s just that a lot of activators do 10, or 11, or 12 contacts and then stop. So if they do two different parks - not a 2-fer, and they just happen to hit the same number of Qs…
The bottom line is that there are a lot of activations happening. You’re already gathering the data, it would be trivial to build a dashboard that shows a graph of how many Qs/As/Ps happened every day for the past however long you please. It’d be interesting to see.
Paul, you are right, I see all the activations every day during batch jobs. I could easily modify the process that synthesizes the mode data to also track the same data, especially uniques. I don’t think I’ll have time to get to it before I take off on my giant rove, so probably April for that work. Great idea.
Do you (or some agent on your behalf) just scan the page for every park every day?
If so, you have a lot of data that might offer up some interesting insights.
I’m aware I still owe you more articles on POTA statistics. Life has been in turmoil here since before Christmas, as my wife had knee surgery and needed my assistance to do anything more active than sit on the couch knitting. She’s now walking about with a brace and can drive herself to appointments so I’m slowly getting back up to speed.
I see the deltas each day and then make additional calls to synthesize a full daily feed into POTAmap. When a park is activated, for example, I see that but not the details, it requires a few extra calls.
But, you are right, I have the info already in the nightly POTAmap feed, and I’ll add a few lines of code to store daily stats. I keep three prior data sets but that’s not enough to establish a trend.
And don’t stress about writing, this is a stress-free zone. I’ve been seriously out of the POTA mindset for the past few months, I ran across a significant archaeological find inside a POTA park late last year and have been busy documenting it. I sent the initial draft of the discovery paper to my journal editor yesterday, the paper will be published in the spring.
AND I’m getting on a train next week headed west. I have a 30-day Amtrak pass and I’ll be traveling around New Mexico and surrounds for pretty much all of March, planning to get back into New England early April. On the plus side, it’ll give me some serious writing space, on the minus side I’ve launched a national research organization around my current interests, it’s already more active than PN&R ha! But that’ll be occupying a lot of time, too.
Disentangling N-fer QSO counts from what are in reality “single operations” would be cool. N-fers blow-out QSO counts for POTA, sometimes considerably so. I’ve never activated an N-fer, ever. Every QSO I’ve had in POTA has counted only once. I know that I have the top POTA QSO count for CW mode for the past couple of years AND for this year, yet I’m currently ranked third for CW mode for 2026, fourth in 2025 and so on. This isn’t a huge deal for me, it’s just some fun number-setting goals for me to keep track of. WWFF does it the right way, in my opinion. I’ve been #1 for QSO count for 2024 and 25 in WWFF and hope to be for 2026. WWFF doesn’t consider mode, just QSOs. In POTA, a big QSO count isn’t as impressive as it first appears! 
The N-fer business is part of why I wish the entire database of POTA QSOs was public.
If you had access to the database, it would be more or less trivial to see the N-fers and the effects of the N-fers, because it would be easy to simply match QSOs that appear in separate parks.
I am probably overthinking. It is, in the end, just a game. It’s a very fun game, but it’s still just a game.