N1CLC: 2020-07-25 My First POTA

I did my first “Parks On The Air” (POTA) activation today, Liman Lake, Park K-1062. POTA is similar to “Summits On The Air” (SOTA) in that it’s a sort-of gamified outdoor activity where you take your ham radio and make contacts from station to station (no repeaters). SOTA has summits, POTA has parks. The listing of parks contains state and national parks. I’m not positive but I don’t think you get anything other than a “point” for each park. I still have some work to do to fully understand their scheme regarding award levels etc. Maybe they should have something like “park bear”, “park lion”, etc. LOL.

It actually took me two attempts to complete the activation. Liman Lake not far from my summer villa and the drive over was simple. During the first attempt, my CW paddles malfunctioned (a screw came out inside so they wouldn’t work. As I was preparing to switch to more power and an antenna that would support that and do SSB, a thunderstorm moved in. It was my lunch hour and I was working so I had to get back to the house.

My second attempt went extremely well. I setup my station with a nice view of the lake to start with. Because I could drive into my operating position, I took a lot of extra stuff that I don’t normally hike with. I decided to setup my FT891 100 watt radio, a chair and a multi-band vertical antenna. I started out on CW (morse code) to keep my practice up. Before I spotted myself, I noticed that Adam, K6ARK, was on a mountain doing SOTA, so I worked him for my first contact. Once spotted on pota.us, I had several callers and my first 20 contacts were were via CW. I switched to SSB to use phone (voice with a mic) and I made 23 contacts including a couple of park-to-park calls. I finished the day with a couple more CW contacts to SOTA operators and packed up. All in all, I made 45 contacts. The exchange is similar to doing SOTA, give the guy a signal report and your park reference, get your signal report, and move onto the next one or you can chew the fat for a while.

The weather started out hot, but as clouds moved into the area, it was perfect. There was a gentle cool breeze blowing through, keeping the temperature down. It was relaxing and enjoyable.

Uploading the logs to the POTA system is a huge pain in the ass because the format required doesn’t match anything my logging program will do so I had to output the data and then do a little search-and-replace to get it to work right. I’ll build a system to reduce the workload in the future, I already have some ideas on how to do that. One other thing, the logs are mailed to a human who does the upload for you so they are a long ways from the high tech environment that the SOTA team has. SOTA has a band of volunteers around the world that run and improve their high tech system for uploading data and getting all kinds of stats. So in the end, the hardest part of POTA is getting the logs to upload. There’s no need to upload logs if you don’t want to but I wanted to make sure the “hunters” got their points since they depend on my logging the contact with them.

I got a nice email from the dude trying to upload my log. I had made a mistake and left a SOTA designation in the field that should only have a park reference. The admin's email was very helpful. I fixed it and one other thing and am waiting to see how it came out. It reminds me of of batch processing compute days back in the 70s where you would send a text file to an operator in the computer room and then wait for success or fail and then some sort of output. I’m sure they will improve this over time.

All in all, I’m looking forward to my next POTA activation. It went extremely well except for a screwup on my GoPro. If you are waiting for the video, bad news, I set the GoPro to time-lapse for a couple of critical segments so that part of the activation didn’t go so well. The one thing that makes SOTA and POTA fun is that you can travel to a place and people will trying to contact you rather than you hunting around for someone to call or just sit there calling CQ. Being outside and running portable is always fun for me.

SOTA	POTA
Activators are the ones that go to a summit	Operators who go to a park are lso called activators
Operators that look for activators are called “chasers”	Operators that look for activators are called “hunters”
Find a summit by going to sotl.as or sotamaps.org/	Find a park by going to pota.us and naving to the map link. (it’s pretty nice).
You can drive walk, mountain climb, free solar or use any other method to get to a summit. Most likely access is hiking.	POTA is the same but most are driveups. For some, you could hike in. Most likely access is driving into the park.
Requires 4 contacts to get points	Requires you make 10 contacts to get points
Summits have different points depending on height.	All parks are one point (I think)
You want to be comfy, bring your own chair	Use a park bench and table some times.
Operate completely stand alone using any power and any mode for bands you are licensed on. If you drive up, your station can’t use your vehicle power, antenna, etc.	Operate at any power or mode but it looks like there are no restrictions on using your vehicle or other power source.
High tech web sites and stats	Low tech but it works.
Use sotawatch.sota.org.uk/ to “spot yourself”	Use pota.us/#/ to spot yourself
Activators and chasers upload logs. Uploads are automatically checked and instantly added to your stats.	Only the activator uploads a log. If the hunter is in that log, then the hunter gets some cred. Evidently I’ve contacted several POTA operators (25) over the past years of doing SOTA. Uploads are done by another human, checked and take some unknown amount of time to process.
Have fun	Same :)

Contacts

BAND	CALL	COUNTRY	NAME	STATE	TIME_ON	Other Ref
40M	K7EN	USA	KENNETH	UT	171300
20M	N4EX	USA	Rich	NC	171900
20M	W0MNA	USA	Gary	KS	172000
20M	W0ERI	USA	Martha	KS	172100
20M	VE3LD	Canada	Charles		172300
20M	W9AV	USA	Julien	WI	172400
20M	W5QC	USA	WILLIAM	AR	172400
20M	WB2FUV	USA	Michael	NY	172600
20M	W4LSV	USA	Barry	TN	172700
20M	N6TVN	USA	Carl	CA	173000
20M	K8MH	USA	Marc	MI	173100
20M	KO4SB	USA	CHARLES	AL	173300
20M	AA5UZ	USA	JUDY	LA	173400
20M	WA6L	USA	Douglas	CA	173500
20M	AC0A	USA	William	KS	173600
20M	AA3K	USA	MARK	PA	173800
20M	K9DRP	USA	Donald	IL	173900
20M	WI8J	USA	DUANE	MI	174100
30M	KD0YOB	USA	Peter	MN	174700	On summit W0C/PR-128 in CO
40M	K6ARK	USA	Adam	CA	174900	SOTA W6/SS-004 Middle Palisade In Sierra Nevada mountains.
20M	AA4RF	USA	Lewis	VA	175500
20M	N8II	USA	Jeff	WV	175500
20M	W8SMN	USA	John	OH	175600
20M	KO4SB	USA	CHARLES	AL	175600
20M	VE3LDT	Canada	David Wg		175600
20M	KW2DX	USA	JOHN	IA	175700
20M	KN4OK	USA	DAVID	AL	175800
20M	K8HQ	USA	Christopher	MI	175800
20M	KF9RX	USA	HERBERT	TX	175900
20M	K0YY	USA	ROGER	TX	180200
20M	W0YJT	USA	John	KS	180300
20M	KC4CYO	USA	WILLIAM	NY	180400
20M	K7EPH	USA	EDWARD	ID	180500
20M	K7TYE	USA	Sean	OR	180600
20M	W6WUR	USA			180700
20M	KX4BI	USA	Vance	AL	180900	Park to park, K-3791, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, TN
20M	W1OW	USA	William	MA	180900
20M	W3GLH	USA	Gary	PA	181000
20M	K8RDG	USA	DAVID	MI	181000
20M	KD5FBA	USA	SCOTT	TX	181200
20M	VA7ES	Canada	Eric E.		181300
20M	K6TOR	USA	RICHARD	CA	181400
20M	WD5CSK	USA	Ronald	OK	181600
20M	N7YY	USA	Dan	OR	183000	W7O/WV-029, Table Rock, OR
20M	W7EEE	USA	Tim	WA	184500	W7O/CE-058, Pine Mtn OR