For SOTA, you only get activation points once per calendar year. For POTA, you can log 365 activations from that same site in that year.
Where do our awards fall? SOTA? POTA? In between?
Personally, I’ve never understood the appeal of sitting in the same park over and over, making as many contacts as you can. I feel like a ‘kilo’ award should be something of a surprise after a few years of activating, not something you go out and pursue.
I get it that many ops really enjoy dong that.
Including a SOTA style restriction on the number of parks would do one of two things, I think:
Encourage people to find new parks to activate
Not participate
I’m hugely in favor of the former but not the latter.
I’ve done activations that amounted to a very pleasant hike with a brief break for radio play time. I’ve also got Kilos at two parks (US-3216 Lake Sammamish SP & US-12342 Stillwater State Wildlife Area) and I’m well on my way to a third park.
It’s a different sort of experience. Multiple visits to the same site are not the same; you get to see how things shift with the seasons, or even week by week. “Oh! The northern flickers are passing through!”
Propagation varies by season as well, so the usual suspects in June are not the same cohort as in late November.
Travel time for me to a park I haven’t yet activated is, at a minimum, roughly two hours, so hitting new to me parks is generally either an all day affair hitting 3-5 parks with ~5-6 hours of driving, or it’s an two day (or longer) excursion hitting many parks.
I can see how it would be different if I live in, say, Massachusetts or Rhode Island, where it looks like you can throw a stone from one park to the next. Is one way right and the other wrong? Nope. If POTA is a different game in the PNW from POTA in the Bosnywash corridor, that’s fine.
That said, being able to earn an award over and over seems fun.
I activate the same park pretty much every day. Chalco Hills SRA US-4011. Its less than five minutes from my house, and it’s a big park with lots of different areas where I can setup my station. I think hunters appreciate me being at the same park because they can quickly work up enough contacts to gain all 25 Repeat Offender Hunter awards (500 QSOs). I have pileups every day, and it’s a blast to work through the bands and work through the callers one by one. Sometimes I’ll go an hour or more without sending a single CQ. I’ve got callers at every sending speed. Many have told me I was their first CW QSO - That’s a blast! I’ve watched as hunters have gone from very green CW ops to being new members of CWops sending at 25+ WPM with me. I’ve been doing this for over three years without missing a day activating. For whatever reason, I just don’t get tired of it. I absolutely love CW, and that’s a huge part of it. As long as folks keep calling me, I’ll keep going to the same park almost every day! Tomorrow is day 1,115 and I can’t wait to get to the (same) park!
Like most everyone involved with hunting/activating POTA, Jim is in my logs many, many times. He was one of the very first I very timidly hunted using CW, and I definitely appreciate his extraordinary patience with my shaky first attempts. I have a very clear memory of one contact pretty early on, when instead of the expected “W7PFB GA UR 579” I heard “W7PFB GA PAUL UR 579” and I sat there, dumbfounded, until I realized what I’d heard was my name.
Thanks so much, Jim. Your patience with those of us taking those first steps into the CW world and your activating so often are doing a great service to the entire CW and POTA communities.
So good to have your voice here, Jim. What’s your current streak of daily activations, or is that something you even care about? Our friend Bob WC1N hit 1,200 days in a row a year or so ago.
I use you as a beacon, I know if I can hear you, I can probably get out ok, except at Portola Redwoods in CA where you literally were the only signal I could hear, on any band!
I’m leaning pretty hard into limiting the number of times a park can be used for any given award. My reasoning:
A goal of the PN&R awards is to encourage people to visit parks
The Original POTA awards cover multiple activations really well
I’m thinking it is a small number of times, like 5 or 10, that a park can be used per year. The number needs to be small enough that you can’t earn an award from a single park. Related is elimination of n-fers.
Good to be here, Perry! I just completed #1,115 today. It’s more or less just a fun personal goal to have, and I do track it. I’ve been activating CW every day since November 5th, 2022.
Texas is a big state, and parks aren’t exactly densely packed in the northern region. My closest park — my “local” — is 16 miles away, while every other park around me requires at least an hour’s drive. The nearest option across the Oklahoma line is still 44 miles out. Sometimes there just isn’t enough time in the day to make a round-trip hour-long drive to another park.
Because of that, I end up using my local park the most unless I’m prepared to dedicate at least half a day for the drive, the activation, and the return trip. Camping at one of the farther parks is a different story, of course — that opens up more time and makes the trip worthwhile.
Man, that is the one ‘flaw’ baked into POTA. There are vast swaths of the country where there just isn’t a reference for a hundred miles. Rob, do you just suck it up and drive?
From your perspective, what are the kinds of awards that interest you as an activator?
Pretty much. Fortunately there’s not a lot of traffic in the part of Texas I live in. Speed limit is 75 almost everywhere so it doesn’t take long to cover distance. I don’t “normally” activate in QRP mode sideband but maybe there can be an award for that? Like X amount of QRP activations in a year and no more than two at the same park within that year. Throwing out a number like 10 QRP activations over a year. I’m usually running 20, 50 or a hundred watts on my activations.
I think the solution will be that an activator can submit logs as many times as they like, but for awards purposes only one activation per “season” (spring, fall etc) will count. Activation of a park in each of the four seasons earns a special award on that park. The Cycle or Vivaldi or somesuch.
I’m going to weigh in with a contrarian view based on how wildly different different regions of the US (let alone other countries) are.
Rhode Island has a land area of (according to Grok) 1034 square miles, and 61 POTA entities, so you get one POTA park for every 17 square miles.
You propose to let everyone activate each of those 61 parks once a year.
Now come out to my neck of the woods. Olympic National Park is not even close to the top ten largest US National parks, but at 1442 square miles, it is 1.4 times the area of Rhode Island. As in, literally, this one national park is 40% larger than the entire state of Rhode Island.
Rank
Name
Location
Area (square miles)
1
Wrangell–St. Elias National Park
Alaska
12,980
2
Gates of the Arctic National Park
Alaska
11,749
3
Denali National Park
Alaska
7,406
4
Katmai National Park
Alaska
5,739
5
Death Valley National Park
California/Nevada
5,319
6
Glacier Bay National Park
Alaska
5,035
7
Lake Clark National Park
Alaska
4,091
8
Yellowstone National Park
Wyoming/Montana/Idaho
3,467
9
Kobuk Valley National Park
Alaska
2,733
10
Everglades National Park
Florida
2,357
The top ten National parks are, all of them, at least 2.3x times size of the entire state of Rhode Island.
Don’t even get me started on National Forests, National Wildlife Refuges, &c.
Please explain to me why you think that the activations of Olympic National Park should only count once per year, but you’re willing to count all 61 parks in Rhode Island as separate places for the purposes of your award system?
You do have a point, Paul @w7pfb. Olympic must have many great spots to set up a POTA activation. Once per season in Perry’s latest post.
Another way to word this idea is that the Olympic Peninsula has a hole in it that’s 1.4 times the size of Rhode Island but only 1 park.
It doesn’t look to me like people living there have too few options compared to other places in the USA. Park density looks similar to my area and travel times may be similar. Acadia NP is less than 8 miles from here but longer than an hour’s drive.
I’d say Kansas residents have it worse than either of us although travel is much quicker there IME.
And you’re right, many places in the world will have less park density than Kansas.
The Real POTA awards already reward activating the same park repeatedly. Do you have any ideas for encouraging people to activate different parks or are you in favor of allowing the same park every time? Is there a middle ground?
Three equal-area screenshots. I chose Kansas from my prejudices. I did camp in Kansas a few times last year.
I have a hunch that the density expressed by hams/parks is relatively constant across the USA…
Instead of arguing sides (which is fun, I’ll admit), I’ll just ask the question:
How do we encourage POTA activators to explore new places?
At the end of the day, that’s what all of this is about. As I said to Santi kq1o, people who sit in a parking lot and run off 600 Qs are not interested in reading my 3,000 words on Santa Cruz taffeta sandstone.
I also have to say, and I’ll probably repeat myself elsewhere, is that this discussion with all of you has really helped me to understand who the audience for PN&R truly is. I’ve been doing a lot of work to bring in all of POTA, but that’s just not who is interested.
I think the POTAmap has general interest and seems to be used by quite a few folks, and I also think that this forum will be useful once the awards chatter dies down, there didn’t seem to be one already for some reason – maybe Facebook has replaced that itch for a lot of people.
The weekly POTA news seems relevant, too, and it’s a good exercise in AI agency.
So, really just a slight refocus of my own efforts, more toward backpacking and away from the general POTA population.
My point, which I didn’t really make very clear, is that Olympic National Park, although not even one of the really big NPs, likely has thousands of delightful places to hike to, set up, and operate POTA.
You could probably spend a lifetime activating ONP once or twice a week and never repeat a location.
So your proposed award schema doesn’t actually encourage people to go out, take a hike, and activate along the way.
Question for @w1grd , where do you stand on what I’m guessing (I don’t know, and it would be super interesting to find out) is the most common mode of activating a park: go to the park, hit the restroom, pick a nice picnic table with a delightful view, set up and operate from the picnic table. The picnic table might be 50 ft from the vehicle, it might be 2000 ft, but it’s likely closer to 50 because park managers want the tables to be easily accessible for people hauling their picnic from the car to the table.
Also, if I go to a wildlife area, schlepp my pack .25 miles and set up in a meadow, is that backpacking, or is that too vehicle centric?
I took your point and was being lazy, but I think you’ve been stating the solution since we began this conversation…pretty sure it was you.
To your question, I think a picnic table is legit, and I operate that way once in a while. It’s nice to finally sit at a table and look at a nice lake or whatever. To that I’ll add that I think the Spirit of POTA involves exploration, I’ll sometimes sit at a table if I’m pressed for time, or if the park simply doesn’t include a trail, like the more urban parks I’ve been in. I’ve never felt that sitting in a vehicle pounding out Qs is very much in the Spirit, if at all. I guess my line is whether you’ve attached something to the vehicle.
I also understand that the park-n-bark style of operating is really fun for a large number of people, and I certainly can’t find fault with their methods, it is just a different approach to the same set of rules. I’ve been walking on eggshells trying not to sound like I somehow oppose that kind of operating – I don’t oppose it in any way, I just don’t like it, and a lot of what I do is to encourage people to get out of their car and look around.
To your search for equity, I think what you’ve been saying all along is to think about grid squares. So, POTA, but with grid squares? If you get down to six characters you might be able to do picnic tables on opposite sides of the field…
Any grid square? Or just in numbered parks? Is there already a portable grid-square program?
I think it’s a really interesting idea, finally. Maybe you’ve been walking me down that path…
A six letter Maidenhead Grid square (e.g. CN97bq, which includes my home) varies in area depending on the latitude. Mid latitudes, the area is ~30 km^2. The maximum point to point distance inside the square is ~10km
I posted a poll on the POTA discord about activation styles, it’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out. I know what I enjoy, and although what I do varies from park to park, I’m always choosing the least sheltered option available - that is, if it’s sunny I won’t be in a picnic shelter, and I’ll often opt for my Helinox Chair Zero and the kneeboard even if there are picnic tables available. What I’d do without that spiffarino chair, I don’t know, it feels like essential POTA gear to me.
The main grid square chasing program I know of is the FFMA - Fred Fish Memorial Award, which if I recall is all 6m. But I know plenty of hams who chase grid squares who don’t limit it to 6m. The FFMA is using 4 letter grids, I think.
I’d be psyched to activate all the 4 letter grids in the US, that would be quite an adventure.
