I actually don’t know what I think about this yet but I want to put it out there:
Should we include parks that POTA doesn’t? City parks? That sort of?
I rather like that POTA is exclusive to state and national. Some scarcity and weirdness is a good thing. If entities were everywhere, I wouldn’t seek out oddball activations.
Propose a new programme called Going Outside On The Air (GOOTA) as a catch-all.
I think I agree with you, and limiting the domain to just POTA references simplifies things quite a bit.
Some of this came out of me wondering about the intellectual property rights associated with the POTA reference numbers (US-0001 etc), and whether we’d have to build our own set of park references. IANAL but based on my understanding of the law, identifiers like that are not protected. They can’t be trademarks, and facts, identifiers, catalog numbers, and short alphanumeric codes are not subject to copyright.
Aren’t the WWFF ‘numbers’ and POTA ‘numbers’ the same where an entity is in both programs?
There’s an historical reason for that. I think Don is right, it probably doesn’t make sense at this stage to include non-POTA sites. The majority of activators won’t even know there is a new awards program, and I don’t think we have the bandwidth to make decisions about what’s a park and what isn’t in the PN&R program.
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I would vote for city parks to be included. I don’t like having to drive for an hour or more to get to a Park. Would think it would boost activity for more casual activators.
For example, the largest city park in Toronto is only a few miles from my usual Marriott Hotel. It is 525 acres. I have driven through it a few times, but without a rig. Centennial Park is close to the Toronto airport (which is in Mississauga). That is just an example; since I have been visiting the Toronto area for over 25 years, I stay a week at a time. If there were more city parks near major airports, I might fly in to activate. Not in the Winter, however, but go places in the hot months in Phoenix.
You know, I really love the idea of city / county parks. I’m trying hard not to drip reality into our brainstorming, but I have to think that the effort required to document what has to be an enormous number of parks is too stiff a task in the early days.
What about allowing people to use a city / county park as a wildcard in some of the awards?
Or we could even do our own ‘Local Park’ day where all the activations are from non-POTA parks…
How would the database of city parks be be kept up to date?
Exactly! We can barely even keep the base POTA sites up to date. I have to imagine that it’d be user-driven, so an op activates a new city park, uploads the log, and we issue a new identifier, maybe automatically. Of course then you’d end up with a lot of ‘parks’ that were entirely located within someone’s shack…
I can see that become unmanageable real quick. As a current map rep for New Mexico, I would not relish the thought of maintaining city parks also. I know its tough for some activators out west that have very few parks compared to the east coast and have to drive a fair distance to get to a park, Unfortunately that’s just the nature of the beast. It has been brought up a few times to add city and county parks or parks of a special or historical significance with the answer being “not at this time”. Currently, there are: US=12527, WORLDWIDE=82986 in the database.
Without commenting on the wisdom/practicality of adding county/city parks, I would observe that there’s essentially nothing preventing someone from claiming they’re activating a park but actually operating from their shack. Oh, I suppose someone with the cool SDR based RDF stuff could do the work to show your signal isn’t coming from the park. But realistically? Nah, not going to happen.
And, of course, if you claim “Chez W7PFB” is a park located at CN97bq, and someone shows up to activate the park, what’re you gonna do? Let them in, show them the shack, tell’em to turn out the lights when they’re done? Again, sort of self solving problem.
The big issue isn’t the workload for the mapping reps in the sense that, uh oh, now the database is really big. The big issue is that suddenly the program has to manage a relationship with every county and city. It’s relatively easy to manage things with state agencies and national agencies. When you add counties and cities, it’s gonna be crazy.
I often do short xOTA hunts from local parks. What about crediting portable2park qsos, defining portable as a setup you bring and take with you to any public place?
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