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We often read that POTA is the “fastest-growing activity in U.S. amateur radio.” I’ve said it, too. Several times. I think satellite operations are a distant second growth activity. But do we actually know much about POTA activity growth through empirical data? My impressions are based on guesstimates from data on Canada where I analyzed a national survey of hams conducted originally by RAC. In 2001, some 37% of those Canadian hams said they engaged in portable operations, including POTA, SOTA and the like. It ranked 9th among 37 common ham activities in the survey. They reported to the tune of 15.7% participating in satellite operations. Alas, we do not have parallel data on U.S. hams so these are inferences made from comparative data. But data nonetheless.

It is not unusual at all for most of us to gain our impressions of ham radio activity through social media. Heck, there are Youtubers who say they make their living from their channel(s) and associated activities! Those who do not work at it full time or don’t even monetize their outlets add significantly to the mix of media impressions. So if POTA activity gets a very large share of social media output, our best guesses are shaped by those impressions in the absence of empirical data themselves. This applies to things other than amateur radio, like politics. You get the point. In a vacuum of data, we get captured by social media.

To illustrate, here’s a Google Trends result from using both “Parks on the Air” and “POTA” as search terms with a five-year window ending circa January 25, 2025. In the dual trend lines, POTA wins as a search term but both show a marked, continuing, and slightly growing interest through search terms on Google. The brand “POTA” seems to have currency in Google Searches as a frequently-used proxy for all social media output. Thus, social media impressions are strong in this one!

We need data to complement what we see through social media. In this article, I present a brief snapshot on POTA activity among U.S. hams. I use data actually reported to the POTA website to describe where all of the current U.S. POTA sites are located. I also examine 2025 annual data for all activators as well as all activations reported to their website. I have not seen any research like this reported by the POTA administration or other hams. If readers do see what I’ve missed, I’d appreciate receiving the link. I’m good on QRZed.

Here’s a snapshot of key POTA elements using these data. I use maps and basic statistical tools to help describe patterns in POTA activity. The results are organized into POTA sites, activations and activators in 2025. I think the reader will gain much greater insight into the POTA program activity since inception in 2017 through these data.

POTA Sites Across the U.S.

Owing to the origination of the POTA program as a continuing expansion of the National POTA program by the ARRL, these official sites include national parks. These favor undeveloped areas (and cannot be developed without permission) outside of urban centers. POTA adds many, though not all, state-controlled parks and similar preserved entities. They add or remove POTA entities on an ongoing basis. As of December 2025, the map below illustrates the locations of all POTA sites in the U.S.

The map shows definite visual clusters of sites in the Northeast. Although not shown, this region also has a high density of licensed hams. Florida, Missouri and Utah also have clear and distinct concentrations of POTA sites. These are followed by Michigan, Washington, Arkansas and California. These states have internal clusters within the state characterizing POTA site distributions. Note that these are both Federal and state-controlled parks and related sites (wildlife management areas, etc.).

The data show that POTA sites are far from uniformly distributed across the U.S. Given the basis for founding the POTA program on the sunset of NPOTA by the ARRL, we would not expect them to be for U.S. Parks alone were founded to be undeveloped protected areas away from urban centers. This map puts a finer point to where official POTA sites are located. In future articles, I’ll show more details at finer spatial scales on the characteristics of POTA site locations.

POTA Activations

While POTA sites are all over the U.S. and not uniformly distributed, how frequently each one is activated by hams is far, far less uniform in nature! I took each POTA site’s lifetime activation numbers and put them on the map below. After examining a histogram of the distribution (not shown here), these intervals were placed on the number of times each park was activated: 0-1, 1-1000, 1,500-2,500, and 2,500-5,381 (highest). They seemed to reflect the observed cut-points in the activation data.

While most parks have been activated at least once—although difficult to see on this scale—I emphasized parks by size of the circle, colorizing each category. Those with the largest circle shown in red are the most highly activated POTA sites in the U.S. Where are they? Mostly along the Appalachian Trail, near the popular vacation spot of Orlando FL, in the Midwest, and one in the Northwest in Washington. Those one step down in size shaded in blue tend to follow this same pattern with the exception of one in Colorado.

These results show that there is some linkage of POTA park activation frequency to distance from the market of hams for activation. In consumer economics, the “friction” that distance to any consumer choice will generally favor shorter choices over longer ones, especially over time. This tends to affect the frequency of consumer choice such as which POTA park to activate. The map of most popular activations in the POTA program is consistent with this long-standing consumer behavior paradigm.

Friction of distance in consumer behavior represents the time, effort, and financial costs required to access goods or services, causing a reduction in interaction as distance increases. This concept drives consumers to minimize travel, favoring closer options, which impacts store choice, purchase frequency, and online engagement by reducing cognitive and physical load. 

The reader might look at this map and think that this is not clearly reflecting this phenomenon. While it does depend on the market of hams and that subset who participated in POTA since the 2017 inception, it is a fair question. I’ve put another visualization of how unequal the distribution of activations across parks in this program is from 2017-2025. The curve in the graphic below reflects the following. The number of activations for each park was sorted from highest-to-lowest with the cumulative percentage computed for each. The ranks from 1 (most activated) to 11,996 (least activated) came from the original sort. The cumulative percentage of the total activations that each park represents is plotted against the rank. (In statistics and economics, this is a type of Lorenz Curve.) This curve tells us just how much of the total lifetime activations are reflected by each park. If each one had an equal share, the line would be flat and straight from zero percent, rank 1 to 100 percent, rank 11,966 (number of POTA parks).

I have placed three lines noting the share that the top 100 parks (green), 500 parks (blue) and 1,000 parks (red) are of all activations ever reported to the POTA program. The green line intersects the 20 percent line of all activations. In other words, 100 parks account for one-fifth of all activations. The top 500 parks account for some 40 percent. Finally, the 1,000 top parks out of the almost 12,000 POTA sites account for one-half (52%) of all POTA activations since the program began in 2017. This is a highly unequal distribution demonstrating the dominance of a small portion of POTA sites in total activations.

POTA Activators in 2025

Who are POTA activators? This is in intriguing question as social media profiles suggest they are significantly comprised of hams who face housing restrictions on home antennas outdoors. Not all of them, but enough to make a clear inclination toward portable operations in the activity space of Parks on the Air^(tm). I’ve shown two pie charts below to illustrate the composition of POTA activators in terms of license class. On the left are all amateur licensees in States (no territories) as of December 2025. On the right are POTA activators in 2025 using U.S. call signs, individual licenses (no clubs).

Note: I always remove those licenses that have reached their expiration date. The FCC ULS data system does not. This is for their convenience since an expired license is dormant but can be recalled for activation by the operator within two years. The FCC database management team simply keeps this license record in the database in case of that recall. This is for their operational convenience. This often confuses hams who just download the ARS data from the FCC ULS system and compute totals without fully understanding the curation protocols in the data themselves!

As has been made widely known, Technicians are the largest operator class in the U.S., here over 49 percent. Generals are next at about one-quarter with Extras comprising about one-fifth. The dormant Advanced Class (about 4 percent) and Novice Class (less than one percent) round out the distribution of operator classes at the end of 2025.

POTA activation is dominated by Extra and General Class licensees. Over half (57%) hold Extra Class licenses with almost forty percent being Generals (39%). Only two percent (or 257 hams) reported activations in the POTA program. Another two percent (rounded to the percent) of Advanced tickets participated in POTA park activation. These data show that it’s an HF-privilege game, largely, as only 257 Technicians used the meager HF privileges they have to activate a POTA park, unless they were using other modes facilitated by their band privileges. It’s almost an all-General/Extra affair in POTA at this point.

Some POTA activators are far more active than others. To illustrate this, consider the box plot shown here. The average number of activations in 2025 was just over 23 (mean = 23.4) but ranged from 1, the minimum, to 3,396! The median number is 5 with the mode just being a single park activation (the mode being the single most occurring number). The distribution of individual ham POTA activations, not unlike what we saw for parks, is highly skewed. This suggests that the social media haze of the fastest growing activity might be based on the extreme number of activations by a small number of hams.

This box plot represents the percentile distribution of the number of total activations by each POTA activator reporting in 2025. As the bottom text details, out of the activations last year, one-quarter reported 2 activations (Q1, or lowest quartile). One half reported 5 activations (median). Some three-quarters activated 19 or fewer POTA parks (Q3 or third quartile). Those activators reporting 20 to 3,396 are classified as extreme values. I’ve put a black rectangle around the hams whose number of activations reflect statistically extreme values in this distribution. They are shaded in blue. These extreme activators contribute a lot to the POTA program while the vast majority of portable operators reporting to the POTA program reported less than 20 last year. Do the extreme activators garner the bulk of the social media presence regarding POTA activity?

To flesh out where these extreme POTA activators are located, I’ve created the map below. There are light green and dark green points. Together, they represent all 2025 POTA activators reporting to the program. The dark green points are the license locations of these extreme POTA activators. They are concentrated along the Appalachian Mountain trail and environs in the subregion. They are scattered throughout the rest of the U.S. in small clusters within states we have mentioned before. I’ll demonstrate more below. But I want to emphasize that the dark green points reflect hams who repeatedly activate POTA sites in extremely higher numbers than the vast majority of POTA participants.

To help the reader see the connection, I have put all POTA activators on a map with the most activated POTA sites as shown above. This map also has urban and metropolitan areas designed on the base map. This will become more important in future articles on the POTA program. But for this snapshot, it confirms the role that distance to POTA sites plays in the frequency of activating any POTA sites.

In an analysis not shown here, I estimated a spatial regression model (spatial lag specification) predicting the number of activations by the distance in miles to the nearest POTA site for the ham operator. These are for those hams who participated in POTA during 2025. The results show that for every mile further the nearest POTA site is, the ham activated one-half fewer times during the year (i.e., a reduction of 0.5 activations per mile). I’ll study this more in future articles but suffice it to say here, where hams are located does affect the choice of parks and the number of times they activate them.

Thoughts

This snapshot provides the first look at the POTA program from a national scale using data rather than social media impressions or conversational anecdotes. What do we see?

There are a small number of POTA sites that account for at least half of all activations since the program began. Not surprisingly on the heels of this finding, there are a small number of extreme activators who account for a significant share of last year’s POTA activations. These extreme activators are scattered throughout the same regions as the most activated parks. Perhaps I will examine those patterns in a future article but the empirical fact remains: POTA is dominated by a small share of extremely active operators, almost all of whom hold General or Extra Class licenses. The largest license class, Technicians, are just not part of the game in this activity space in 2025.

As in most consumer behaviors, distance to the “product,” here a POTA site, shapes the frequency of consumption. My initial regression model showed a one-half activation reduction over the year for every mile that the nearest POTA site it to hams who reported activity during 2025. This result begs for further analysis. Has it been this way since the beginning of the POTA program (2017)? Does the ham’s location in the rural-to-urban residential continuum affect this “friction” of distance? Perhaps we will find out in future articles.

This descriptive snapshot gives the reader a clearer picture of where POTA sites are and which ones are most popular for activators. But the majority of activators pale in comparison to the extreme activators. The median for 2025 was just 5 activations, illustrating that one-half reported less than five with the other half more than five. The mode was a single activation. Are the social media reports indicative of these “small timers” or of the extreme activators? Well, watch social media portraying POTA for yourself. There could be a lot of experimentation by hams in 2025 who just did a POTA activation to see if it was for them, then decided it was not. Or they just did it as a social activity with ham friends and the schedule precluded more activations than just one or a few last year. We don’t know. But it appears that longer trip distance to activate a POTA site might largely eat away up to a half day, something that many amateurs would not have very frequently available for this activity. These data are consistent with that pattern.

Clearly the initial finding that 2025 POTA activators activated less as the nearest official site was further away begs for additional analysis. Distance requires an increased time commitment. Those on social media who both frequently activate POTA sites, especially serially in a “rove,” devote a significant amount of time, money and preparation in doing so. Nothing wrong with this. But how common is it within the market of amateurs interested in POTA operations? Not very, these data suggest. It begs the question of where are most ham operators located relative to existing POTA sites? Are they too far away to be practical for their sphere of obligations to activate official POTA sites very much?

I’ll explore this avenue in future articles because it is important to gain our impressions from data rather than the pantheon of what we see on social media, particularly where the outlet is monetized on the content creation surrounding their POTA activity. We reported results suggesting that it may just be a small group of all activators who live in some favorable propinquity to POTA sites themselves or who monetize their time expenditure for POTA content creation (i.e., they are “working”). This leaves out many hams because of the choice of sites by the POTA program and the legacy of National Parks as the foundational base for the program itself relative to where they live.

I’ll close with the observation that Technicians are only two percent of the reported activators in 2025. It seems a shame that these licensees don’t have more of a place in this activity space. Getting 2 meter simplex working, for instance, would be very challenging for many POTA sites. Are there other viable options to engage the largest group of hams in the U.S. license classes into more portable activations in parks? Yes, SOTA is one. It takes SOTA sites with significant prominence to facilitate such contacts that could count as a two-fer (SOTA and POTA). SOTA sites are not uniformly distributed to offer universal access either. It seems a wasted opportunity to have POTA sites that do not overtly engage Technicians to participate at a higher rate than merely two percent of all activations in the most recent year. I’ll look into this in future articles.