I’ve been mulling the idea of POTA News & Reviews sponsoring a POTA award or two. I’m just brainstorming at the moment…what sort of awards do you think would be fun for both activators and hunters that isn’t already?
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I’m thinking it’d be interesting to have a few categories that would reset each year, and everyone would start at zero.
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I’ve always thought of myself as not prone to extrinsic motivations so I’ve been fascinated by how much my behavior is shaped by awards programs. I mean, I earn a Kilo award at a park, and this award is worth… nothing tangible? And yet I’ll eagerly head to that park to stack up more QSOs there. Go figure.
My thinking is that what’s best in award programs is a wild diversity of awards. Ideally, different awards would push participants to expand their interests and abilities.
currently we have activator awards for number of parks activated, number of activations, repeatedly working from/into a park, repeatedly working the same callsign as an activator/hunter.
There’s no award for simply racking up operating time - say, 20 hours in a park. Just count the time from the first QSO in the log for an activation and the last one.
It’d also be interesting to have awards for activating/hunting at differing power levels. It’s one thing to activate a park using 100W, and it’s another thing entirely to do it using 100mW.
Likewise, an award for distance - I’ve been thrilled to bag Sweden several times on 10W CW, and I’m always pleased to hear from my hunter friends in Japan. The thrill of a long distance QSO is enough that it’s altered what bands I work at different times of day when activating, just to improve the slim odds I’ll get Europe or Asia on 10w.
And of course, you can combine those last two and offer awards for kilometers/W.
The big road block to some of those is that current logging platforms (and past uploaded logs) are missing power data.
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Morning Perry, I must admit the award system for POTA does need looking at, although I do like the Idea of gaining some of the awards easier, such as Bronze Activator/Hunter. Also the fact that there is an oppurtunity to go further with them. If you look at say S.O.T.A. The awards there take a good deal of hard work and dedication to achieve. Mountain Goat for instance can take a long time to achieve if you are only able to climb lower height summits that have small points attached.
I hope that when the planned changes (that have been a while in coming) for POTA , that they are achievable with a certain amount of work and dedication.
Possible suggestion from me would be to expand on the 6 metre Award, by say adding 10m & 12m?? currently its 10 contacts on 6m from 6 different parks. so 10 contacts on 10 from 10 different parks?
Nice subject matter, let’s hope more come in with ideas?
Anthony brings up SOTA’s Mountain Goat, and I think it illustrates some of the difficulty coming up with POTA awards. If you happen to live where I do, the nearest SOTA summit is around 50 miles away and is 1 point. Most of the hills here are 1 point (MG requires 1000 points).
If you happen to live, say, in Colorado, or Norway, your local grocer is probably a 5-point summit.
Same with POTA, there are large areas in the US where there just aren’t a lot of parks. It’d be nice to have something for those folks, too, and to be fair the official POTA awards program covers a lot of those operators with the bronze/silver/gold and so on levels that are relatively close together and achievable by just about everyone.
The flip side is that we create an award that truly is tough and either you want it or you don’t. There’s likely a good mix of awards that are fun (Worked All BBQs) and those that are challenging (POTA Goat level).
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I’m a big fan of PSK31 and it’s brothers/cousins, and have long been a member of the PODXS070 PSK31 club. They have some awards that I very much enjoyed earning - the 365/366 awards are perhaps the most relevant for this discussion.
You earn those awards by making at least one PSK31 contact on every day in the calendar. For the purposes of the award, UTC days are used. It’s cumulative, so you can cover every day across more than one year (some members managed a clean sweep, getting every day in one calendar year, but for anyone with other things in life, that’s pretty hard to pull off).
A similar award is the 24/7 award, earned by making a contact in every hour, for each day of the week. Again, cumulative, you don’t have to stay up for 7 days straight.
I learned a lot about behavior of different bands across the seasons and at different times of day chasing those awards.
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Digital-only awards might be interesting…
Did you earn the 365 award?
“Did you earn the 365 award?”
365/366 - Yes, I earned them. On the face of it, it seems like it should be easy, right? You just fire up your shack at, say, 2330Z, make a contact, stick around past 0000Z, make another contact, and come back two days later. This strategy works great, until you hit radio blackouts, travel to visit/help ill relatives, and then it starts to get hard. I didn’t have any way to operate my shack remotely (which would make it far easier) and had no ability to operate portable at all.
In the end it took me two years. At the end of one year I had something like a dozen days to cover. Towards the end the membership of the club was watching my inch closer, and tagging those last few remaining days was easier because I’d fire up the radio and find 3-6 club members waiting for me, so that it essentially became a community effort to nudge me over the line. On the last day I needed, there were a pile of members watching, and I had a slew of contacts congratulating me, and then when I finally turned off the radio and before I uploaded my log, there was email on the club mailing list celebrating my success.
I’m not much of a paper chaser but earning that award/endorsement was a major challenge for me and it’s the award of which I am most proud. I’d say I learned more chasing that award than any other award I’ve earned. I’m certainly glad I managed it before FT8 came along and decimated the ranks of PSK operators.
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I actually decoded my first PSK stream yesterday, BPSK31. Still figuring it out but I love the keyboard-to-keyboard aspect.
Also congrats on that crazy award!
The fun thing is that the KX2 and KX3 give you a way to run psk31 without an external computer, just using the display for output and the CW key for input. I’ve done it exactly once, but I’ve made perhaps a dozen QSOs with my end being the usual computer/soundcard/radio setup and the other end being a ham using the native PSK31 on a KX2 or KX3.
PSK31 would make a very nice mode for doing POTA activations. For me, it’s far more fun than FT8/FT4, and although I certainly understand that many hams loooove FT8/FT4, for me it’s about as exciting as watching dry paint bake in the Arizona sun.
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I’ve done CW/RTTY on the KX2, I didn’t realize it would also do PSK31. I’ve also used RTTY on the IC-705, it’s a much better decode experience since you have multiple lines, but there’s no built-in CW to RTTY capability. You can fake contests with memories, but once you are out of that format you are out of luck on the 705
I’ll look at the PSK31 side on the KX2, might be interesting to try several minutes of calling on an activation.
Is there any way within POTA to reward walking or QRP or 10W or even SOTA summits within POTA parks? These might take more data and the honor system. I know when I hear “QRP” from California, I try my best to work them. When I’m calling with 10W from a summit, I have met extreme patience getting my call through. Right now these count the same as a kW home station working an RV with a beam. That’s not wrong but it’s not the same thing.
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I think POTA has too many easy hunter awards. Many are just counting QSOs so could be replaced by an odometer. When I first registered, I already had a small boatload of hunter awards.
The only POTA hunter award that I actually worked toward was Worked All States.
Thanks for the forum.
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The QRP handicap is hard to assess, let alone design adjustments to compensate.
Sure, doing a 5W activation is not nearly the same as doing a 100W activation. Heck, a ham local to me is putting a 500W amp into his Ford Bronco to use when he does activations.
The problem is how do you adjust for this? in the same way 5W into a wire is not 500W into a BuddiHex, 5W in the Pacific Northwest US is not even remotely the same as 5W in, say, Louisville KY, where you can’t swing a cat without hitting 500 hams.
Is it fair? Heck, no. Life is like that sometimes. Ok, maybe all the time. I can spend pretty much whatever I please on gear, and someone else has to save for months to buy an SW-3B or QMX. Fair? Heck, no, not even remotely.
My line of thinking is this: forget fair. It will never be fair. Instead, focus on fun. What award do you think would be fun to work toward?
I wasn’t thinking of “fair” at all. I was thinking of ways to encourage lighter-weight activations.
As I said, I seek out QRP from Calif (or anywhere far) because it’s rewarding. And fun. I have to think it’s also fun and rewarding for others. Just maybe look at some way to make an award.
Yes, I pointed out that it’s not the same but that’s not because it’s unfair. I don’t even see it as unfair, just different types of activation.
I used to do what we called ‘poker runs’ with my local flying club, you’d fly to several airports and receive a playing card at each stop. Then we’d all fly back to home base and have a BBQ and award prizes for various poker hands - best, worst, and so on.
We could do the same, everyone goes out and does a five-park rove, getting a playing card for each (maybe from a server) and next day we’d award prizes on a Zoom party.
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Ah, my fault for reading my random thoughts into what you wrote. Sorry!
I’d be delighted to see awards that encourage/incentivize QRP operating.
That said, I’ve watched a fair number of videos of activations, and read a fair number of activation ‘reports’, and I am continually astonished at how wildly different activation styles can be. Some folks roll into the parking lot with the radio on, tune up their ATAS antenna, bang out 10 contacts, and move on to the next park; not only do they not even leave their vehicle, they don’t even bother to turn off the engine. Other folks reach the park, look at the park map, wander around a bit before they settle on a picnic table, set up and operate for an hour or more. Some folks set up easy-ups. Some folks wander into a field, deploy their Helinox chair and a kneeboard, and operate like that. Some folks wander to some point of interest, sit on a rock, and they’re good to go.
The same diversity is on the hunting end. Many hunters are running 100W into a simple wire antenna at home. Some are operating QRO with big beams on towers. Some are running 5w sitting on a bencvh outside their workplace.
It’d be nice to see awards that encourage people to try styles that are different from what they usually do. I think there perhaps should be a “W7PFB” award for activating a wildlife area sitting in a lightweight chair with a radio on a kneeboard, with extra points for every wildlife species spotted during the activation.
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Done! 
It would be nice to really think about hunter awards. There are a lot more hunters than activators, and the awards more or less mirror the activator awards, which I’m not sure is optimal.
~15300 activators in 2025. ~36000 hunters. Yeah, that’s a lot more hunters than activators.
Chasing a “do an activation on each of the 366 calendar days” would be a mightly long row to hoe.
Chasing a “hunt an activation on each of the 366 calendar days” would, however, be quite a lot easier.
I’d sure like to see things like repeat offender hunter, and states hunted, &c, be broken out by mode. So you’d get States Hunted CW, States Hunted Data, States hunted Phone, for example.
Or even just awards for how many unique activators you’ve successfully hunted.
You probably included both the difference in effort to set up and the number needed to be counted. But I’ll make that last part explicit anyway.
If a hunter makes a single POTA contact then they get credit for it.
If an activator makes 9 contacts then they get zero credit for them. They should log the “unsuccessful” activation so the hunters get credit.
I haven’t found statistics for how many attempts are unsuccessful. I can’t be the only one. For last Sunday’’s SOTA event, I was in a park but activated the summit and not the park on purpose.
I’m starting to get serious about this. I wonder what the POTA team will think about a parallel awards program? Guess I’ll go and ask them.
[update - I sent Jason a note. I would think that POTA would welcome anything that promotes the hobby.]