I set up individual hunter and activator categories under a general awards category to talk about specifics, moving the awards discussion over that direction.
Some sort of treasure hunt would be fun… I have zero idea what that would look like but I like treasure hunts!
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I was very active with Geocaching for over 10 years, and always tried to get the cache if it was placed on a SOTA Summit. I know plenty of POTA Parks will have geocaches in them. Is that what you were thinking of maybe ?
No, but I also did some geocaching back in the day, had lots of fun with that!
For ‘treasure hunt’ I had in mind things like Worked All BBQs if you work four or more of the BBQ ops (K6BBQ, N9BBQ and so on), or work ten parks with the word ‘Battleground’ in the name…that sort of thing.
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That’s sounds cool and great “FUN” 
You spell out various country names using the suffix letters of callsigns from your QSOs. So, for example, a QSO with W1GRD would give you a G, an R, and a D. The automated checker figures out how much progress you’ve made.
The advantage of this as an award is that until you get quite close to completing it, every single CQ call you see is an opportunity for a QSO that will help you make progress.
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Paul’s Spell-O award made me think of a few…
- The Mode Master, Master of Modes (with a nod to Craig Shoemaker). Submit logs showing at lest 50 contact on each of CW, SSB, and FT8/4. Endorsements for additional modes and we might crown an overall Mode Master for each year.
- Monthly Word Hunt. We put up a word-hunt style grid, 12x12 or somesuch, with embedded words related to radio and POTA and the Grateful Dead. Like Paul’s Spell-O, you have to use letters from calls in submitted logs to solve the puzzle (and each letter in a call only once).
- The obvious WAS and WAC (maybe), mixed and mode-endorsed, resets each year.
- Rig-2-Rig. Basic award at 25. You can only submit QSOs with the same model rig on both ends.
- Worked All Numeros. Somehow make it challenging to work the numbers in callsigns…
- DX Decade. Submit logs showing at least ten DX POTA contacts.
Obviously some of these won’t fly, just getting them down on paper…
Hi all, a few quick thoughts on awards, FWIW.
- I like the SOTA “completes”, i.e. you’d try to hunt a park you’ve activated, and vice versa.
- It would be cool to credit P2S QSOs; doesn’t require matching if you can just accept ADIF fields indicating the summit for the other end.
- It’s fun to have awards recognizing some local lore, e.g. Master of the Black Dog. Not sure how this could be managed at scale, maybe allow any ARRL affiliated club to manage one for their area…?
- The award I’d most like to see is an iNaturalist integration; you get points for logging species observations along with a POTA. I know you don’t want to deal with matching; I’m happy to help with this. iNat has a pretty nice API, so I think matching iNat location entities to parks is tractable. Here’s an example of observations from one of my activations.
Totally understand if these are out of scope, but thought I’d throw them out there 
.
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COMPLETES! Yes, yes, yes…
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Ah, yes. The “GA JIM” award!
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Is there anything from WWFF that would be useful to replicate?
I did get a small involve with WWFF , but when speaking to other hams, the issue with them is you have to send your log to an admin, along with Photos showing location and a pic of your sat nav/gps device showing your locale. plus have to achieve 44 q’s which can be difficult if conditions are poor. ?
My understanding is that the 44 QSOs can be made across more than one visit. But the documentation requirements feel somehow feel like a fun killer to me.
I do notice that when I get callers from Europe, they often end with ‘44 es 73’ which suggests they participate in WWFF, and I’ve thought that perhaps spotting for WWFF might net me more callers from Europe. But I’m in the PNW and contacts from Europe happen for me only when condx are favorable over the pole. But when condx are good I can always expect to hear from Thomas SM3NRY, is he a frequent flyer for those of you on the east coast of USA?
Definitely , and if you forget to get them while you there, then I don’t think they accept your activator log, so the Hunters lose out aswell ?
It seems really popular…I don’t think I would find all those rules very fun, but we all POTA differently.
Copypasta from QRZ, this is where my head’s at right now…
I’ve been thinking about the awards program for weeks now. Its been really good to look my reasons for even suggesting it, and what I’ve realized is that the current POTA awards just don’t do anything for me. Really the only number that I track is the number of unique parks I’ve been in, because that’s what got me into POTA in the first place – it’s a really gratifying excuse to get into the woods. I don’t pay any attention to all of the incremental awards.
The entire goal of the PN&R awards is to get people out of their vehicles.
I’ve been really struggling to come up with a program that rewards hikers. The current iteration of the ruleset requires you to be 100m from any vehicle. We’d even bounced the idea of multiplying the number of Qs in a park by the number of hikes it took to get them. It’s getting a little silly, honestly.
The conclusion that I’m coming to is that an awards program is going to be of little interest to the small number of us who are devoted hikers. It absolutely isn’t going to interest anyone who does Park-and-Bark style POTA from their car. I’m getting close to a decision to just put the awards on the shelf for a season instead of trying to force it. In its place I’ll just try to lead by example – I’ll continue to write in-depth articles covering the geology, history, and ecosystems of the places I visit so that people can see what lies beyond the picnic tables. If you’ve read my articles you know that there might be 3,000 words discussing the incredible rock formations in a park, and one paragraph discussing the activation itself. It’s a niche audience.
@W5ESE and @KO6IOJ are right about what I think of as the spirit of POTA – it is designed to encourage people to actively visit the amazing natural spaces that are around us all. That’s my focus for PN&R, and I think that the awards thing has become a major distraction that doesn’t have a significant payoff.
One good thing that’s come out of the exercise is that I stood up a forum specifically for POTA ops, and it’ seeing good growth. I didn’t see any sort of gathering spot for us – the QRZ forum is the closest – and it made sense to fill that gap. Right now it’s full of chatter about awards but as that dies down it’ll be a nice place to communicate that’s somewhere between Discord and Facebook. I think that the Field Notes topic on the forum is going to be useful, it’s a spot where you can drop a short note about a park you’ve recently been at, like ‘South parking lot is closed until January’.
Oh, the Calendar, too, a shared calendar for POTA events. That’s something we didn’t have.
That’s where my head’s at right now.
It’s worth pondering what Seth Godin called the “minimal viable audience”.
I ran a poll on the POTA discord. Not very many responses. But maybe, just maybe, enough to cast a little light.
One third of activators do activations that don’t leave the circle of support of their vehicle.
40 percent do activations from picnic shelters or picnic tables.
Only 10 percent checked the hike option.
If I wanted to get people out of their cars, and away from the picnic tables, I would:
- try to persuade the ‘work from my car’ folks to try outside the car instead of inside.
- try to persuade the ‘work from outside my car’ folks to try the picnic shelter or picnic table with a view of the lake.
- try to persuade the ‘picnic table’ crowd to try going for a walk thru the park before or after.
In other words, it’s probably easier to get people to make a modest incremental change than totally revise their behavior.
Me, I’m still trying to get my ham friends to pile some gear in the car, drive to the $%^& park, set up, and do one activation. A lot of them are guys who can’t climb a flight of stairs without being out of breath at the top - no amount of cheerleading on my part is going to get them out the door for a hike no matter what award I offer them. Just getting them to set up in a park - any setup, even inside the car - I would score as a smashing success.
So interesting that you mention Seth. I met him at a conference ages ago – he was on a panel – and I really internalized his ideas around building a tribe. It’s exactly the way Wayne Green operated. The underlying blueprint of PN&R was from Day 1 based on Seth and Wayne’s model of building community around a common theme.
The aha for me is how small the community truly is, when I’m honest about defining my own interests.
I think that being the change you want – in our cases, talking about how WE like to POTA – might be enough to bring a few folks around. It feels like CW POTA is already a bit elitist, maybe we can do the same for hiking in.
It’s so good to REALLY think about these things and talk about them. So few people have any kind of critical reasoning capability or independent thinking anymore.
Something else I learned from Wayne was to be fearless about trying things. If you have an idea, and it isn’t ridiculous, just try it and see what happens. As Dylan said,
If it don’t work out,
You’ll be the first to know.
You can plan all you want, but until you bait the hook and toss it in the water, you have no idea if someone’s gonna bite.