POTA Year to Date

General
1

just for yuks I pulled the stats for the current year, up to date as of 2/21/2026

| Activators | Parks Activated | Total QSOs | CW QSOs | Data QSOs | Phone QSOs |

|-----------:|----------------:|:----------:|:-------:|:---------:|:----------:expressionless:

| 6,270 | 27,153 | 2,184,061 | 357,958 | 368,570 | 1,457,494 |

Uh. Well, apparently markdown tables don’t work?

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2
Activators Parks Activated Total QSOs CW QSOs Data QSOs Phone QSOs
6,270 27,153 2,184,061 357,958 368,570 1,457,494

You had a stray character at the end of your headers…

3

Those are large numbers.

4

42K Qs per day. Yeah, big.

not quite 7k CW Qs/day. Those are rookie numbers, we CW ops need to start bringing our A game.

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5

I’m still having trouble imagining 7,000 CW QSOs per day at a sustained rate. I look at the POTA spots for CW activations during the day, it’s usually a short list. There are six activations right now.

What’s the average number of QSOs for a CW operation?

6

I don’t know, because I don’t have a convenient way to capture a feed of individual activations.

In any case there can be no easy answer, because there’s likely a difference in the distributions number of CW QSOs between the cohort of activators which is exclusively cw, the cohort which is CW newbies who are doing SSB to validate the activation and then throwing in CW as much as they can, and the cohort that basically does very long activations where they do CW, data, and phone, rotating as the exhaust the current pool of hunters for that mode.

And it’s not as if activators are only ever one of these. Example: me. Lately on days where I get out to do an activation, time permitting I will do three activations. The first two will be essentially CW park and bark - I set up, run until I get 10 contacts, wind it down, and move on to the next park. The last activation of the day, I set up and run until I run out of hunters, run out of time, or just get tired. So the first two will be 10-12 Qs, and the last might be 20 or might be 70, depending on a lot of variables.

Lately I’ve been snapshotting the activators.json file daily. If I get some time I’ll write a tool that will let me generate the delta between two activator.json files and then I’ll be able to get some aggregated average from activators who have used CW each day, although if they do one activation entirely with CW and one entirely phone, there’s no way to disentangle that.

7

I wrote the program to generate deltas.

Between Feb 22 and Feb 23, there were a total of 1477 activations, with activators activating 732 parks that were new to the activator (no idea of total number of parks), 63710 Qs, 9996 CW Qs, 11979 data Qs, 41735 phone Qs.

There were 186 activators who included at least one CW QSO.
Those activators did 412 activations and 10175 CW QSOs, along with 2866 data Qs and 6656 phone Qs.

So, a little under 25 CW Q’s on average for activations that use CW at all.

8

I would have guessed an order of magnitude smaller for the number of daily activations.

9

while we’re on the subject of ‘data that will make Perry’s head explode’, I offer: it looks to me like Stuart M0TTQ did 6 activations in a 24 hour period, which is easy to believe. The amazing part is that across those 4 activations it looks like he did 9 phone QSOs and 972 CW QSOs.

I guess I will go look and see if this is a bug in my delta software.
(edited to correct number of activations to 6 from 4)

Second edit: nope, looking at the json activator data for 20260222 and 20260223 it really does say that.

Let’s just say my mind is boggled.

Third edit:
Ok, it turns out that Stuart has been doing 3-fers, and this is two of them. So it’s not 972 Qs, it’s 1/3rd of that