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Does POTA’s Selection of U.S. Park Entities Shortchange Urban Hams?
8 February 2026 | by Administrators Say They Will Not Include Local-Area Parks
On a regular Saturday-morning Zoom meeting of hams a few months ago, a participant in Los Angeles asked the group, “Why can’t I activate one of my local parks and have it count in POTA?” Some of those in attendance echoed the sentiment. Based on that question, I asked myself what does POTA as a program look like? I recently published a snapshot of POTA sites, activations, and activators on this blog. There were several findings that we did not know before I published these results.
As I concluded in that article, “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.” It may be this element that drives the increasing social media presence of the portable park activations.
Another surprising finding is that only two percent of all activators in 2025 were Technician class licensees. While Techs do have some HF privileges, this very small presence as POTA activators is still quite surprising.
What do we know about POTA entities, their use, and accessibility to hams?
The decisions by POTA to start with the National (Federal) Parks used in NPOTA was an obvious baseline. They apparently added what they reasoned were state-owned parks during this rollout over the years since 2017. Now, if one does not understand the federal-state-local data systems very well, it is easy to assume that “all” state-owned parks would be managed through a single state agency for parks, right?
Well, recall that it’s government, which has multiple layers, too. There are usually add-ons to authorizations, unanticipated programs initiated by state legislatures, multi-jurisdictional agreements, and so on. This assumption by POTA likely led to an inconsistent set of “state” parks added later. That is, most state parks are administered by State agencies (see their national association for State Parks Directors). This doesn’t include, except idiosyncratically, parks governed by state agencies under “special jurisdiction” agreements. I have one near my home. It took two years for me to convince my State Mapping Coordinator (who actually lives in Tennessee) that it is indeed a “state” park but governed by a special water district established by the Legislature. That was when a reservoir was created in the 1960s to provide water for the City of Jackson (MS). It is not under the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks agency! This is merely one example that was clearly unknown by my Mapping Coordinator. There are likely many, many other examples.
Over time, there is somewhat of a hodge-podge of park entities at the sub-national level on the POTA entity list, now totalling some 11,966 parks in the continental U.S. as of December 2025. That sounds like a lot, no? There should clearly be enough for everyone to activate one almost any time, right?
Well, in a word: no. There is a significant shortchanging of hams who live in urban centers. For instance, in Los Angeles where Ivan WC2S lives, it takes an hour to drive one-way across the city! Hmm. With so many licensed hams with HF privileges in LA, how many POTA sites do they have to choose from? Nine. It’s worse in Silicon Valley (one) and Dallas-Fort Worth (two). It’s 38 minutes on average to drive across San Jose. Kevin KW6E says that the one POTA site in Silicon Valley gets congested, preventing the myriad of other hams in that high tech region from using them very much without something akin to an informal repeater frequency coordination taking place. Well, that’s a bit of an overstatement but you get the point. There are some 6,907 licensed General or Extra Class hams in the San Jose urban area. In fact, KW6E uses a POTA activation alert just to tell him when the only POTA site in the area is activated so he won’t bother packing his portable gear and driving to it for nothing! It’s as bad in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex where it can take 1-2 hours to drive from one side to the other. In that urban area, there are 11,050 Generals or Extras, almost twice the number in the San Jose urban area.
Considering the traffic congestion and the paucity of POTA sites in most urban centers, I posted on the amateur radio and parksontheair Reddit threads asking about the need for a local parks program. There were well over a thousand views with a hundred plus responses and climbing. Many quickly agreed about the need for activatable local parks but many just expressed loyalty to the POTA program by stating that things are fine as they are now. The flippant answer by some to “just go out doors and drive to a POTA site” as a solution doesn’t begin to consider the full situation for urban hams. That’s one motivation for me to bring data to bear on better understanding it. If one has a half day to do POTA activations, then that’s what it may well take for urban hams to activate various sites. But time isn’t abundant for many amateurs who want to play radio outdoors, especially if they are also employed. An hour might be the largest chunk of recreation time available all week for the vast number of hams in urban areas.
The problem is a classic question of spatial mismatch: how well matched are the spatial distributions of POTA sites, HF-privileged hams, and “local” parks? Are urban-located hams significantly kept away from reasonable access to POTA sites? How many urban hams are there anyway? How would this change if POTA did include local parks (they have stated in writing that they aren’t) or if an independent program included them? I’ve found some rather stark answers to these questions which I’ll summarize below. It’s not consistent at all for most urban centers with off-the-cuff responses to my Reddit thread.
Some Census Geography Concepts
Readers all use city, metropolitan area, and the like in everyday conversation. But most do not fully understand how the Census Bureau defines and designates areas in the U.S. as urban, metropolitan or non-metropolitan areas. I’ll give a brief synopsis with illustrations to help the reader better understand the results for activating parks. The definitive reference guide is the Census Geographic Areas Reference Manual (or GARM). If the reader skips this section, the results following it may become confusing.
Shown below is a map of the Continental U.S. (CONUS) with states and Census Divisions illustrated. The red “blobs” are urban areas, largely representing cities in the country. Those areas in blue are metropolitan areas as designated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) every few years. The of green areas are micropolitan areas, largely thought of as smaller cities unto themselves. The light tan areas are counties outside of metropolitan areas, called non-metropolitan counties. They are highly visible, for instance, in the Midwestern states and elsewhere. They are what most would call rural areas. These are the officially defined geographical designations from the Bureau of the Census I used in this study.
This is a high-level visualization, of course, so we need something more specific to better understand the spatial mismatch of POTA sites, hams, and local parks. The graphic below further illustrates and officially defines several of these geographic concepts. (I used to give PhD students in my spatial analysis course an exam on all this geography.) I’ve used Los Angeles as an example with the Death Valley area as a supplement.
We can think of Urban Areas as the central urbanized portion of metropolitan areas. Not all of the space within metros consists of “concrete-and-steel” as Dr. Jeremy Porter and I demonstrated a few years ago using nationwide remote sensing imagery with these Census Bureau boundaries. Urban Areas do nonetheless reflect the most developed geography within large cities. In fact, they help define the specific metro area itself (see definitions). Metropolitan Areas consists of a core (“big”) county with adjacent counties with strong commuting ties to the core county. Micropolitan Areas, by contract, are smaller urban centers with a smaller core county and adjacent ones. We often think of them as middle sized cities situated distinctly apart from larger metro centers. The Core-Based Statistical Area (CBSA) is a combination of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Areas which give a larger geographic unit characterizing a set of adjacent and economically integrated units. Finally, a Combined Statistical Area (CSA) puts together two or more adjacent Metro or Micro areas with strong economic and social ties (“bedroom communities,” satellite cities, edge cities, and so forth). The Bureau usually considers the non-metropolitan counties not included in the above categories as rural areas.
Parks, Hams and Analysis Procedures
These geographic concepts are used to compare the locations of POTA sites to licensed hams with HF privileges, the ones most likely to participate in field activitions. I did restrict these hams to those with General or Extra license classes. Technicians have limited HF privileges but comprised only two percent of all activators in 2025. I used the Trust for Public Lands ParkServe(tm) database which contains all known parks in the U.S. to identify “local” parks. There are several classes of parks owned or managed at the sub-State level. For simplicity, I only use the municipal (or city) parks here. These are most identified with local government jurisdictions.
The TPL works with local, state, federal, private, and multi-jurisdictional entities each year to identify and track protected lands. Parks are an essential part of these lands. This is a far superior resource for the identification of parks, especially and the state and local levels, than is the approach taken by POTA Inc. The fact that a large team with state representatives monitors these protected lands annually ensures that the parks included meet specific criteria with yearly updates in any relevant changes. I believe that the POTA organization leaves this up to the local Mapping Coordinator who may not actually reside in the state of reference and who may well not annually verify each POTA entity.
To be included in the ParkServe database, a park or ‘park-like’ place must meet the following criteria:
- Be located outdoors
- Be a named destination (e.g. not an unnamed median or drainageway)
- Encourage informal public use (e.g., the public is encouraged to walk through and stay awhile)
- Encourage at least one ‘park-like’ activity such as socializing, enjoying nature, or play/exercise
The TPL performs many more analyzes to evaluate parks for access, amenities, climate, and so forth. This results in both a ParkServe Index score as well as prioritization of areas needing access to more parks for the population surrounding the local areas.
Municipal-owned parks from the ParkServe database in the 48 Continental States (CONUS) totalled some 101,301 park entities. By accessing the POTA.app website, I downloaded the list of POTA sites as of late December 2025 with their assigned latitude and longitude coordinates and activation summaries, reflecting point data for their list of official entities for activation. To profile the ham population, I used all licensed General and Extra amateur license-holders in the FCC ULS database for circa 2025 (downloaded January 1, 2025 to reflect the end of FCC transactions for the previous year). Those whose license had technically expired but remaining in the database (a known practice to preserve the ability to renew an expired license within two years) were excluded (see Snapshot article). For this study, I included only hams in the Continental U.S. (excluding AK, HI and territories).
This included 191,282 Generals and 159,522 Extras for a total of 350,804 HF-privileged hams in the continental U.S. These are called GE hams throughout the study. Yes, I realize that Technicians do have some limited HF privileges and note that in the narrative as only two percent of POTA activators in 2025 were Technicians. I omitted legacy Novices (5,028) and Advanced licensees (29,327) from this analysis for convenience. Should the reader think that these omissions would change the results, I’ve described the methods sufficiently to replicate them with Novices and Advanced licensees included if so desired. Technicians (381,563), long the largest share of amateur licensees (49.8%), were also extracted for use in a later part of the study. Again, these numbers only reflect those in the Continental U.S.
What are the Issues Addressed in this Study?
The questions guiding me are these:
- Where are POTA sites collectively located and how does this compare to the urban concentrations of HF-privileged hams (Generals & Extras)?
- Are local municipally-owned parks substantially more or less accessible than POTA sites to GE hams in urban areas?
- Is there an imbalance in the access to POTA sites for urban hams and how large of a share of GE hams are affected?
- Does there appear to be a significant market of hams to warrant a new program that organizes local parks into an online system facilitating their activation?
POTA Sites and Municipal Parks in the U.S.
Here is a repeat map from the Snapshot article of the POTA locations extracted from the official POTA.app website. Each one is shown as a red dot over a map of the U.S. with metropolitan and urban areas shown in varying shades of gray underneath on the basemap.
By way of general reference, the map below is very similar to the one above for POTA sites. It displays municipal parks shown as blue dots. Obviously, they are clustered in cities where local governments own or manage them. While there are many more local municipal parks than POTA sites, their pattern clearly emphasizes city locations, many more in urban areas than in the non-urban population areas. While the spatial scale is national, we will see below how the accessibility varies with POTA sites for GE hams.
A well-known GIS issue of spatial scale is why both maps appear to show parks everywhere hams might be located. We need to examine smaller areas to determine whether there is reasonable access to POTA sites and, if not, whether local parks might resolve that issue for most urban located GE hams. A large area might appear inundated with parks until one has to actually drive to one. Let’s take a closer look.
Spatial Access Profiles of POTA and Municipal Parks
Before jumping into the results, here is an example of how spatial access is measured. Shown below are excerpts of two maps illustrating an area east of Atlanta GA. The center point of each hub is the location of a POTA site with all of the GE hams for which it is the nearest POTA site (first map, in red). I created a polygon around the furthest points for related ham operator locations, reflecting the minimal “friction of distance” to activate their nearest POTA park. This polygon is called a convex hull in math and is a common spatial tool in GIS. I have done the same thing for the second map (in blue) depicting the nearest municipal park for the same set of GE hams. To compare how accessible each park is, we compare the relative convex hull size of each POTA and municipal park. A numerical number that is useful for this is the area in square miles within each convex hull polygon. The larger the polygon, the longer the average distance it is from GE hams to the nearest park.
In the profiles for the cities below, I will omit the hub-and-spoke elements for clarity and overlay only the POTA and municipal convex hulls on the base map. This will give the reader an explicit visualization as to how accessible each type of park is to GE hams in the region.
Profiles for Several Major Cities on Park Access
This is a summary of accessibility for five metropolitan areas and cities across the U.S.: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles and Seattle. All have significant average drive-times in their respective traffic patterns. In the maps below, the pink polygons are the convex hulls for POTA parks, depicted as red dots. The blue-purple polygons are similar convex hulls for municipal sites. These are noted in the legend. In general, the reader will see a far greater pattern of accessibility to municipal parks in these large U.S. cities than for POTA sites. Let’s go through each one.
The Atlanta core urban area (above) contains a high concentration of GE hams, some 7,734, although the growth of the northern suburbs has exploded over the past few decades. But there are only two POTA sites in the core urban area (see center pink polygon). The travel distance is much, much longer than to the many, many municipal parks. As the reader examines those burgeoning suburbs, the same pattern is present: far more accessibility to municipal parks than to the sparse POTA sites. This is only visible using the appropriate spatial scale.
Chicago (above) is a major urban center in the Midwest, a long-time growth location in the history of the United States. It, too, is a suburban-growth metropolitan area. There are 10,058 GE hams in the Chicago urban area. Chicago has no POTA entities in the urban area. There are a small number outside in the southern and western suburbs. But, as with other urban centers, there are numerous municipal parks available with short travel distances for GE hams.
The Metroplex (above), as the Dallas-Ft Worth metropolitan area calls itself, is a surprising case. It is a spread-out urban development in many ways. So one might expect more POTA sites than in, say, Atlanta or Chicago. But there are only two: one in northeast Dallas and one in southeast Fort Worth! With the drive time associated with the Metroplex, these two POTA sites require a significant period of time to activate. The many municipal parks, by contrast, do give many GE hams access for the figurative hour-long activation. There are 11,050 GE hams in the Dallas-Fort Worth urban area, slightly more by comparison than in Chicago.
The drive times in Los Angeles (above) are famous. Famously long, that is. This can place a clear burden on hams who want to engage in POTA activations. The map above illustrates the relatively few POTA sites in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. The convex hull depiction of POTA site distance illustrates this in a city where there are 22,276 hams with General or Extra licenses as of December 2025. The number of municipal parks are far more accessible than are POTA entities in LA. This gives a birds-eye view to why Ivan WC2S asked why can’t I activate a local park in POTA? There are so many more of them!
Seattle (above) is a city culturally focused on outdoor activity with mountains, water and other recreation pursuits nearby. There are several POTA sites in the Seattle urban area. In the Seattle-Tacoma urban core, there are 13,171 GE hams living there. But even in an outdoor-driven locale, the accessibility of municipal parks is far superior to POTA sites in the region. The blue-purple polygons characterizing the “service area” for each municipal park for the GE hams nearby is rather clear even in the metropolitan urban core with several POTA sites in the general area. The traffic congestion in the Sea-Tac area, focused on the I-5 interstate, is just below what it infamously is in Los Angeles. This added element to POTA activation makes getting to an activatable park site a greater time sink.
These major cities illustrate clearly how relatively sparse POTA sites are in their urban centers. The question remains: How do these major cities compare to the nation as a whole? And does this POTA site scarcity in urban areas keep a significant share of HF-privileged hams from activating those parks? I present summary data on national patterns now. They provide rather clear answers.
National Patterns for POTA and Local Municipal Park Accessibility
I have summarized the national results of this type of analysis in tables below. They provide a clear, focused picture of the relative distances for hams holding General and Extra tickets to POTA sites versus local municipal ones. The gap in accessibility to POTA vs municipal parks by urbanization is fairly stark. To my knowledge, I have never seen the identification of licensed amateurs across the rural-to-urban classifications used by the Census Bureau so this too is a new set of findings in the ham radio literature.
This table shows the number of hams, their percent composition, POTA sites and their respective share, and the imbalance of POTA sites by urban and metropolitan areas. The number of cumulative (lifetime) activations for POTA sites and their share are also included. Finally, the local municipal park number and share (percentage) round out this summary of parks, activations and how they vary by urbanization zones across the U.S.
I also illustrate parts of this table through bar charts below but let me emphasize the spatial mismatch indicators at the outset. Well over one-half of the GE hams in the U.S. CONUS, some 8 out of 10, are in metropolitan areas, largely similar to the general population. They are concentrated in urban zones within the metro area (62.3%). This provides a great imbalance in the locations of POTA sites here. Over a third of these sites (38%) are in the non-urban metro areas with only a very small share (6.5%) in urbanized areas. This imbalance is rather stark relative to the ham population residing in those areas. I include an imbalance ratio of the share of POTA sites to the share of GE hams as a summary figure.
The two bar charts help crystalize this spatial mismatch. POTA sites, largely due to their National Park origins, are mostly outside of urban centers in Metro areas (see left). There are many in rural (non-metro) counties. The mismatch comes with the spatial concentrations of GE hams (see right). Most are located in urban centers of metropolitan areas. Only small shares of GE hams are in non-metro counties or in Micropolitan areas near the third concentration of POTA sites.
How busy these POTA sites are with activations tends to reflect this imbalance. The great inequality of lifetime activations noted in the Snapshot article for the nation as a whole can be partly explained through their location. As shown in the table, half of all activations are in those POTA sites in non-urban metro areas (49.1%). Only 17.6 percent occur in urban portions of metropolitan centers. This is very similar to those in non-urban, non-metro (“rural”) areas. Small cities (micropolitan) have a slightly smaller share (14%). The rest are very nominal in size. Thus, activations in the whole tend to not be where the vast majority of GE hams live. Does this restrict the number of activations by a majority of POTA activators, leaving it to the smaller share of extreme activators? (See my Snapshot article on this.)
In general, consumers obey the “friction of distance” in their shopping behaviors. The closer options tend to receive more shoppers. To give an overall picture of the pattern of distances from where GE hams live to POTA and local municipal parks, I’ve created two simple histograms of these distances in miles. To increase clarity, I truncated the chart to 30 miles but the full range is used to compute descriptive statistics. The average distance for POTA sites is about 7.53 miles. For municipal parks, it is 3.69 miles, an approximate four-mile difference on the average. There are a very small share of hams who live much larger distances than the 30 miles shown to a POTA site as well as the nearest municipal site.
To give a further summary of the accessibility to POTA sites for urban and non-urban areas, I computed the number of GE hams per POTA site within each metro and urban category. This metric is a rough indication of the potential demand for access by these license holders. (This is not unlike corporate site-selection metrics.) The category where most POTA sites are located (shown above) is in the non-urban areas of metropolitan areas. There are 14.9 GE hams per site there. For the inner city urban area of metros, there are many more GE hams, some 280.5 per POTA site! This shows the tremendous potential contention for those sites as Ivan WC2S and Kevin KW6E described in our Zoom conference. It also illustrates the tremendous market for park availability for them to activate should local parks be available.
Smaller isolated micropolitan areas also have a much smaller market, but it depends on the urban status of POTA sites and GE hams. There are 122.1 hams per POTA site in Micropolitan urban areas but only 8.8 in the non-urban regions within them. This reflects another spatial location for park contention and a market for potential expansion to local parks.
The non-metropolitan counties, commonly called America’s rural areas, have another substantial urban gap. In urban areas in non-metro counties, generally thought of as small towns, have ten-fold more hams-per-site (64.3) as those in the non-urbannon-metro areas (6.0). These data show the stark lack of accessibility by urban-based GE hams regardless of whether they are in metro, micro or non-metropolitan zones.
What is the Overall Accessibility to Parks for GE Hams?
While these results make a strong case that urban hams with GE credentials are not well-served by the POTA program, questions remain. How far are they from POTA sites versus local municipal parks? The two histograms above do show a prominent disparity favoring local parks. Moreover, are there cases where POTA sites are closer to GE hams than municipal parks? Remember, it is about the relative spatial proximity of sites to hams.
In the earlier section on major city profiles, I used the convex hull polygon to illustrate how large or small the spatial distance was for each GE ham in the area to POTA versus municipal parks. The area in square miles within those polygons represents the closeness that each type of park is to GE hams for which it is the closest entity. The table below is a summary of that nationwide analysis.
It should not be surprising that the average area in the convex hull representing the nearest park service zone, whether using to the mean or median, is much smaller for municipal parks than POTA sites. This shows how the “friction of distance” is far less for municipal parks because that is where most GE hams are located! The average area for POTA sites is 118 square miles while for municipal parks it is one-fifth that at only 20 square miles. The median, where one-half of the parks are above and below the figure, is 52 for POTA sites and 0.3 for municipal parks. These patterns are rather dramatic by comparison. However, the minimum and maximum illustrate that there are also very large municipal parks (max = 6,652 vs 4,031 for POTA).
Compare the area of the convex hull above to the average distance from the same set of GE hams to POTA vs municipal parks in the line chart below. The urban area effect is clear by comparing the red and blue lines in each chart. The lines depict the difference between urban and non-urban areas in the average distance to the nearest POTA and municipal parks. The three charts pertain respectively to metropolitan areas, micropolitan areas and non-metropolitan counties with urban areas within them. This summary of average (crow flies) travel distance illustrates the three-part elements of the locations of POTA sites, municipal parks and GE hams. It takes all three components to best understand accessibility.
In urban metro areas, for example, the average distance to a municipal park is under two miles. It is over seven miles to the nearest POTA site. All of the urban average distances are about the same regardless of metropolitan classification as for non-urban distances across these metropolitan categories. Thus, for the continental U.S., municipal parks are closer to GE hams than area POTA sites by several miles on the average. The sole exception occurs in the most rural locations, non-urban non-metro areas, where POTA sites tend to be located themselves and are therefore closer.
Are there any POTA sites that are closer to GE hams than municipal parks? Well, yes there are. But not that many in the scope of the full set of licensed hams. Here is why I say that.
The pie charts above show the results for comparisons where POTA sites are closer to individual GE hams than their closest municipal parks. The results are further indications of the spatial mismatch of GE hams and POTA sites with municipal parks being situated in urban areas. Few POTA sites are closer in urban metro areas (8.6%) but more so in non-urban ones (16.1%). Most all municipal parks are closer in for urban metro hams (91.4%). This reverses in Micropolitan areas as almost a third (33.1%) of POTA sites are closer in the non-urban areas there. This drops to about one-fifth for urban micropolitan cities (19.3%). Finally, for non-metropolitan counties, a similar pattern occurs with a fourth (28%) having hams with POTA sites closer than municipal ones. This is not the case in rural areas with urban centers (small towns). Some 93 percent (92.8%) have municipal parks nearby with only some 7 percent (7.2%) with POTA sites being closer. I hasten to remind the reader that the greatest concentration of GE hams is not in rural or suburban areas but in the urban zones of metropolitan areas.
What Have We Learned About the Location of Hams and POTA Sites?
The rather elaborate results show that urban General and Extra Class hams are significantly under-served in access to the POTA program’s current park entities. These parks are just not where the hams live. Booking a longer period of time for portable ham operations is required for GE hams in the largest metropolitan urban centers. I’ll hasten to add that some 62 percent of GE hams live in those areas. There is also time contention for sparse urban sites where there are many hams who want to activate them. Ask Kevin K6WE who lives in Silicon Valley. He has an alert set just to let him spot activators in the single POTA site in his general area. Why? So he won’t pack his gear and drive to one of them only to find RF contention for his transceiver from other hams doing an activation. This scenario is due to the spatial locations of POTA sites, the concentrations of GE hams in urban centers, and the much longer drive times in the transportation networks in those areas.
A classic spatial mismatch interpretation fits these results. By and large, POTA sites are not where the most General and Extra amateur operators live. Thus, POTA sites are activated mostly by a small group of extreme activators and in a small group of POTA sites. The majority of activators in 2025 reported 5 or less such successful trips (median number). (This is from the Snapshot article.) This mismatch is not purely a result of POTA Inc. making intentional choices. Indeed, the National Parks program in the U.S. represents some of our earliest protected lands (thank President Theodore Roosevelt). They were intentionally located in what was then more isolated areas away from urban centers. Adding a mix of state-owned and managed park sites by POTA Inc. merely increased the mixture of official POTA sites that are outside of the larger urban metro centers where most GE hams live.
Even though unintentional, the official list of POTA sites does fly in the face of consumer behavior by ham operators. The well-established “friction of distance” does guide consumer choice, such as choosing a park to activate in POTA (or perhaps, not activate at all). But is it a problem? Can’t urban-based hams just drive to a POTA site and enjoy the countryside? Yes, they can. Obviously, some do. But it does come at a price for the majority of POTA-activating ham operators. For those hams who participated in POTA activations during 2025, my statistical modeling results show that for every mile further the nearest POTA site is, hams activated one-half fewer times during the year (i.e., a reduction of 0.5 activations per mile). This suggests more study 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.
One large issue not directly addressed here are Technician Class licensees. They account for about half of all licensed amateurs in the Continental U.S. (49.1%). Yet, only two percent of them reported POTA activations in all of 2025. This is a topic for further study in future articles.
What can be done? Some ardent POTA fans would (and have on Reddit) say, “Shut up and operate.” Wow. That attitude leads to consternation, frustration and, likely, a movement to solve the problem through competitive means in the marketplace. What do I mean by this? POTA Inc. has said in writing to Ivan WC2S that adding local parks to their system is not going to happen. That is certainly their corporate choice and I for one am not asking them to by implication of these research results. Perhaps it is beyond their technical capability to handle these many more parks. For whatever the underlying reason, they have spoken and they are not going to undertake this.
Is it worth a grassroots movement to launch an independent “park activation” program for local parks? It might be but that coming to fruition remains to be seen. I hope this article has provided some data-driven facts for consideration to those interested in portable operation in parks across the U.S. It’s a great activity space that should be more accessible to all.
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Does POTA’s Selection of U.S. Park Entities Shortchange Urban Hams?
Administrators Say They Will Not Include Local-Area Parks
On a regular Saturday-morning Zoom meeting of hams a few months ago, a participant in Los Angeles asked the group, “Why can’t I activate one of my local parks and have it count in POTA?” Some of those in attendance echoed the sentiment. Based on that question, I asked myself what does POTA as a program look like? I recently published a snapshot of POTA sites, activations, and activators on this blog. There were several findings that we did not know before I published these results.
As I concluded in that article, “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.” It may be this element that drives the increasing social media presence of the portable park activations.
Another surprising finding is that only two percent of all activators in 2025 were Technician class licensees. While Techs do have some HF privileges, this very small presence as POTA activators is still quite surprising.
What do we know about POTA entities, their use, and accessibility to hams?
The decisions by POTA to start with the National (Federal) Parks used in NPOTA was an obvious baseline. They apparently added what they reasoned were state-owned parks during this rollout over the years since 2017. Now, if one does not understand the federal-state-local data systems very well, it is easy to assume that “all” state-owned parks would be managed through a single state agency for parks, right?
Well, recall that it’s government, which has multiple layers, too. There are usually add-ons to authorizations, unanticipated programs initiated by state legislatures, multi-jurisdictional agreements, and so on. This assumption by POTA likely led to an inconsistent set of “state” parks added later. That is, most state parks are administered by State agencies (see their national association for State Parks Directors). This doesn’t include, except idiosyncratically, parks governed by state agencies under “special jurisdiction” agreements. I have one near my home. It took two years for me to convince my State Mapping Coordinator (who actually lives in Tennessee) that it is indeed a “state” park but governed by a special water district established by the Legislature. That was when a reservoir was created in the 1960s to provide water for the City of Jackson (MS). It is not under the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks agency! This is merely one example that was clearly unknown by my Mapping Coordinator. There are likely many, many other examples.
Over time, there is somewhat of a hodge-podge of park entities at the sub-national level on the POTA entity list, now totalling some 11,966 parks in the continental U.S. as of December 2025. That sounds like a lot, no? There should clearly be enough for everyone to activate one almost any time, right?
Well, in a word: no. There is a significant shortchanging of hams who live in urban centers. For instance, in Los Angeles where Ivan WC2S lives, it takes an hour to drive one-way across the city! Hmm. With so many licensed hams with HF privileges in LA, how many POTA sites do they have to choose from? Nine. It’s worse in Silicon Valley (one) and Dallas-Fort Worth (two). It’s 38 minutes on average to drive across San Jose. Kevin KW6E says that the one POTA site in Silicon Valley gets congested, preventing the myriad of other hams in that high tech region from using them very much without something akin to an informal repeater frequency coordination taking place. Well, that’s a bit of an overstatement but you get the point. There are some 6,907 licensed General or Extra Class hams in the San Jose urban area. In fact, KW6E uses a POTA activation alert just to tell him when the only POTA site in the area is activated so he won’t bother packing his portable gear and driving to it for nothing! It’s as bad in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex where it can take 1-2 hours to drive from one side to the other. In that urban area, there are 11,050 Generals or Extras, almost twice the number in the San Jose urban area.
Considering the traffic congestion and the paucity of POTA sites in most urban centers, I posted on the amateur radio and parksontheair Reddit threads asking about the need for a local parks program. There were well over a thousand views with a hundred plus responses and climbing. Many quickly agreed about the need for activatable local parks but many just expressed loyalty to the POTA program by stating that things are fine as they are now. The flippant answer by some to “just go out doors and drive to a POTA site” as a solution doesn’t begin to consider the full situation for urban hams. That’s one motivation for me to bring data to bear on better understanding it. If one has a half day to do POTA activations, then that’s what it may well take for urban hams to activate various sites. But time isn’t abundant for many amateurs who want to play radio outdoors, especially if they are also employed. An hour might be the largest chunk of recreation time available all week for the vast number of hams in urban areas.
The problem is a classic question of spatial mismatch: how well matched are the spatial distributions of POTA sites, HF-privileged hams, and “local” parks? Are urban-located hams significantly kept away from reasonable access to POTA sites? How many urban hams are there anyway? How would this change if POTA did include local parks (they have stated in writing that they aren’t) or if an independent program included them? I’ve found some rather stark answers to these questions which I’ll summarize below. It’s not consistent at all for most urban centers with off-the-cuff responses to my Reddit thread.
Some Census Geography Concepts
Readers all use city, metropolitan area, and the like in everyday conversation. But most do not fully understand how the Census Bureau defines and designates areas in the U.S. as urban, metropolitan or non-metropolitan areas. I’ll give a brief synopsis with illustrations to help the reader better understand the results for activating parks. The definitive reference guide is the Census Geographic Areas Reference Manual (or GARM). If the reader skips this section, the results following it may become confusing.
Shown below is a map of the Continental U.S. (CONUS) with states and Census Divisions illustrated. The red “blobs” are urban areas, largely representing cities in the country. Those areas in blue are metropolitan areas as designated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) every few years. The of green areas are micropolitan areas, largely thought of as smaller cities unto themselves. The light tan areas are counties outside of metropolitan areas, called non-metropolitan counties. They are highly visible, for instance, in the Midwestern states and elsewhere. They are what most would call rural areas. These are the officially defined geographical designations from the Bureau of the Census I used in this study.
This is a high-level visualization, of course, so we need something more specific to better understand the spatial mismatch of POTA sites, hams, and local parks. The graphic below further illustrates and officially defines several of these geographic concepts. (I used to give PhD students in my spatial analysis course an exam on all this geography.) I’ve used Los Angeles as an example with the Death Valley area as a supplement.
We can think of Urban Areas as the central urbanized portion of metropolitan areas. Not all of the space within metros consists of “concrete-and-steel” as Dr. Jeremy Porter and I demonstrated a few years ago using nationwide remote sensing imagery with these Census Bureau boundaries. Urban Areas do nonetheless reflect the most developed geography within large cities. In fact, they help define the specific metro area itself (see definitions). Metropolitan Areas consists of a core (“big”) county with adjacent counties with strong commuting ties to the core county. Micropolitan Areas, by contract, are smaller urban centers with a smaller core county and adjacent ones. We often think of them as middle sized cities situated distinctly apart from larger metro centers. The Core-Based Statistical Area (CBSA) is a combination of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Areas which give a larger geographic unit characterizing a set of adjacent and economically integrated units. Finally, a Combined Statistical Area (CSA) puts together two or more adjacent Metro or Micro areas with strong economic and social ties (“bedroom communities,” satellite cities, edge cities, and so forth). The Bureau usually considers the non-metropolitan counties not included in the above categories as rural areas.
Parks, Hams and Analysis Procedures
These geographic concepts are used to compare the locations of POTA sites to licensed hams with HF privileges, the ones most likely to participate in field activitions. I did restrict these hams to those with General or Extra license classes. Technicians have limited HF privileges but comprised only two percent of all activators in 2025. I used the Trust for Public Lands ParkServe(tm) database which contains all known parks in the U.S. to identify “local” parks. There are several classes of parks owned or managed at the sub-State level. For simplicity, I only use the municipal (or city) parks here. These are most identified with local government jurisdictions.
The TPL works with local, state, federal, private, and multi-jurisdictional entities each year to identify and track protected lands. Parks are an essential part of these lands. This is a far superior resource for the identification of parks, especially and the state and local levels, than is the approach taken by POTA Inc. The fact that a large team with state representatives monitors these protected lands annually ensures that the parks included meet specific criteria with yearly updates in any relevant changes. I believe that the POTA organization leaves this up to the local Mapping Coordinator who may not actually reside in the state of reference and who may well not annually verify each POTA entity.
To be included in the ParkServe database, a park or ‘park-like’ place must meet the following criteria:
- Be located outdoors
- Be a named destination (e.g. not an unnamed median or drainageway)
- Encourage informal public use (e.g., the public is encouraged to walk through and stay awhile)
- Encourage at least one ‘park-like’ activity such as socializing, enjoying nature, or play/exercise
The TPL performs many more analyzes to evaluate parks for access, amenities, climate, and so forth. This results in both a ParkServe Index score as well as prioritization of areas needing access to more parks for the population surrounding the local areas.
Municipal-owned parks from the ParkServe database in the 48 Continental States (CONUS) totalled some 101,301 park entities. By accessing the POTA.app website, I downloaded the list of POTA sites as of late December 2025 with their assigned latitude and longitude coordinates and activation summaries, reflecting point data for their list of official entities for activation. To profile the ham population, I used all licensed General and Extra amateur license-holders in the FCC ULS database for circa 2025 (downloaded January 1, 2025 to reflect the end of FCC transactions for the previous year). Those whose license had technically expired but remaining in the database (a known practice to preserve the ability to renew an expired license within two years) were excluded (see Snapshot article). For this study, I included only hams in the Continental U.S. (excluding AK, HI and territories).
This included 191,282 Generals and 159,522 Extras for a total of 350,804 HF-privileged hams in the continental U.S. These are called GE hams throughout the study. Yes, I realize that Technicians do have some limited HF privileges and note that in the narrative as only two percent of POTA activators in 2025 were Technicians. I omitted legacy Novices (5,028) and Advanced licensees (29,327) from this analysis for convenience. Should the reader think that these omissions would change the results, I’ve described the methods sufficiently to replicate them with Novices and Advanced licensees included if so desired. Technicians (381,563), long the largest share of amateur licensees (49.8%), were also extracted for use in a later part of the study. Again, these numbers only reflect those in the Continental U.S.
What are the Issues Addressed in this Study?
The questions guiding me are these:
- Where are POTA sites collectively located and how does this compare to the urban concentrations of HF-privileged hams (Generals & Extras)?
- Are local municipally-owned parks substantially more or less accessible than POTA sites to GE hams in urban areas?
- Is there an imbalance in the access to POTA sites for urban hams and how large of a share of GE hams are affected?
- Does there appear to be a significant market of hams to warrant a new program that organizes local parks into an online system facilitating their activation?
POTA Sites and Municipal Parks in the U.S.
Here is a repeat map from the Snapshot article of the POTA locations extracted from the official POTA.app website. Each one is shown as a red dot over a map of the U.S. with metropolitan and urban areas shown in varying shades of gray underneath on the basemap.
By way of general reference, the map below is very similar to the one above for POTA sites. It displays municipal parks shown as blue dots. Obviously, they are clustered in cities where local governments own or manage them. While there are many more local municipal parks than POTA sites, their pattern clearly emphasizes city locations, many more in urban areas than in the non-urban population areas. While the spatial scale is national, we will see below how the accessibility varies with POTA sites for GE hams.
A well-known GIS issue of spatial scale is why both maps appear to show parks everywhere hams might be located. We need to examine smaller areas to determine whether there is reasonable access to POTA sites and, if not, whether local parks might resolve that issue for most urban located GE hams. A large area might appear inundated with parks until one has to actually drive to one. Let’s take a closer look.
Spatial Access Profiles of POTA and Municipal Parks
Before jumping into the results, here is an example of how spatial access is measured. Shown below are excerpts of two maps illustrating an area east of Atlanta GA. The center point of each hub is the location of a POTA site with all of the GE hams for which it is the nearest POTA site (first map, in red). I created a polygon around the furthest points for related ham operator locations, reflecting the minimal “friction of distance” to activate their nearest POTA park. This polygon is called a convex hull in math and is a common spatial tool in GIS. I have done the same thing for the second map (in blue) depicting the nearest municipal park for the same set of GE hams. To compare how accessible each park is, we compare the relative convex hull size of each POTA and municipal park. A numerical number that is useful for this is the area in square miles within each convex hull polygon. The larger the polygon, the longer the average distance it is from GE hams to the nearest park.
In the profiles for the cities below, I will omit the hub-and-spoke elements for clarity and overlay only the POTA and municipal convex hulls on the base map. This will give the reader an explicit visualization as to how accessible each type of park is to GE hams in the region.
Profiles for Several Major Cities on Park Access
This is a summary of accessibility for five metropolitan areas and cities across the U.S.: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles and Seattle. All have significant average drive-times in their respective traffic patterns. In the maps below, the pink polygons are the convex hulls for POTA parks, depicted as red dots. The blue-purple polygons are similar convex hulls for municipal sites. These are noted in the legend. In general, the reader will see a far greater pattern of accessibility to municipal parks in these large U.S. cities than for POTA sites. Let’s go through each one.
The Atlanta core urban area (above) contains a high concentration of GE hams, some 7,734, although the growth of the northern suburbs has exploded over the past few decades. But there are only two POTA sites in the core urban area (see center pink polygon). The travel distance is much, much longer than to the many, many municipal parks. As the reader examines those burgeoning suburbs, the same pattern is present: far more accessibility to municipal parks than to the sparse POTA sites. This is only visible using the appropriate spatial scale.
Chicago (above) is a major urban center in the Midwest, a long-time growth location in the history of the United States. It, too, is a suburban-growth metropolitan area. There are 10,058 GE hams in the Chicago urban area. Chicago has no POTA entities in the urban area. There are a small number outside in the southern and western suburbs. But, as with other urban centers, there are numerous municipal parks available with short travel distances for GE hams.
The Metroplex (above), as the Dallas-Ft Worth metropolitan area calls itself, is a surprising case. It is a spread-out urban development in many ways. So one might expect more POTA sites than in, say, Atlanta or Chicago. But there are only two: one in northeast Dallas and one in southeast Fort Worth! With the drive time associated with the Metroplex, these two POTA sites require a significant period of time to activate. The many municipal parks, by contrast, do give many GE hams access for the figurative hour-long activation. There are 11,050 GE hams in the Dallas-Fort Worth urban area, slightly more by comparison than in Chicago.
The drive times in Los Angeles (above) are famous. Famously long, that is. This can place a clear burden on hams who want to engage in POTA activations. The map above illustrates the relatively few POTA sites in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. The convex hull depiction of POTA site distance illustrates this in a city where there are 22,276 hams with General or Extra licenses as of December 2025. The number of municipal parks are far more accessible than are POTA entities in LA. This gives a birds-eye view to why Ivan WC2S asked why can’t I activate a local park in POTA? There are so many more of them!
Seattle (above) is a city culturally focused on outdoor activity with mountains, water and other recreation pursuits nearby. There are several POTA sites in the Seattle urban area. In the Seattle-Tacoma urban core, there are 13,171 GE hams living there. But even in an outdoor-driven locale, the accessibility of municipal parks is far superior to POTA sites in the region. The blue-purple polygons characterizing the “service area” for each municipal park for the GE hams nearby is rather clear even in the metropolitan urban core with several POTA sites in the general area. The traffic congestion in the Sea-Tac area, focused on the I-5 interstate, is just below what it infamously is in Los Angeles. This added element to POTA activation makes getting to an activatable park site a greater time sink.
These major cities illustrate clearly how relatively sparse POTA sites are in their urban centers. The question remains: How do these major cities compare to the nation as a whole? And does this POTA site scarcity in urban areas keep a significant share of HF-privileged hams from activating those parks? I present summary data on national patterns now. They provide rather clear answers.
National Patterns for POTA and Local Municipal Park Accessibility
I have summarized the national results of this type of analysis in tables below. They provide a clear, focused picture of the relative distances for hams holding General and Extra tickets to POTA sites versus local municipal ones. The gap in accessibility to POTA vs municipal parks by urbanization is fairly stark. To my knowledge, I have never seen the identification of licensed amateurs across the rural-to-urban classifications used by the Census Bureau so this too is a new set of findings in the ham radio literature.
This table shows the number of hams, their percent composition, POTA sites and their respective share, and the imbalance of POTA sites by urban and metropolitan areas. The number of cumulative (lifetime) activations for POTA sites and their share are also included. Finally, the local municipal park number and share (percentage) round out this summary of parks, activations and how they vary by urbanization zones across the U.S.
I also illustrate parts of this table through bar charts below but let me emphasize the spatial mismatch indicators at the outset. Well over one-half of the GE hams in the U.S. CONUS, some 8 out of 10, are in metropolitan areas, largely similar to the general population. They are concentrated in urban zones within the metro area (62.3%). This provides a great imbalance in the locations of POTA sites here. Over a third of these sites (38%) are in the non-urban metro areas with only a very small share (6.5%) in urbanized areas. This imbalance is rather stark relative to the ham population residing in those areas. I include an imbalance ratio of the share of POTA sites to the share of GE hams as a summary figure.
The two bar charts help crystalize this spatial mismatch. POTA sites, largely due to their National Park origins, are mostly outside of urban centers in Metro areas (see left). There are many in rural (non-metro) counties. The mismatch comes with the spatial concentrations of GE hams (see right). Most are located in urban centers of metropolitan areas. Only small shares of GE hams are in non-metro counties or in Micropolitan areas near the third concentration of POTA sites.
How busy these POTA sites are with activations tends to reflect this imbalance. The great inequality of lifetime activations noted in the Snapshot article for the nation as a whole can be partly explained through their location. As shown in the table, half of all activations are in those POTA sites in non-urban metro areas (49.1%). Only 17.6 percent occur in urban portions of metropolitan centers. This is very similar to those in non-urban, non-metro (“rural”) areas. Small cities (micropolitan) have a slightly smaller share (14%). The rest are very nominal in size. Thus, activations in the whole tend to not be where the vast majority of GE hams live. Does this restrict the number of activations by a majority of POTA activators, leaving it to the smaller share of extreme activators? (See my Snapshot article on this.)
In general, consumers obey the “friction of distance” in their shopping behaviors. The closer options tend to receive more shoppers. To give an overall picture of the pattern of distances from where GE hams live to POTA and local municipal parks, I’ve created two simple histograms of these distances in miles. To increase clarity, I truncated the chart to 30 miles but the full range is used to compute descriptive statistics. The average distance for POTA sites is about 7.53 miles. For municipal parks, it is 3.69 miles, an approximate four-mile difference on the average. There are a very small share of hams who live much larger distances than the 30 miles shown to a POTA site as well as the nearest municipal site.
To give a further summary of the accessibility to POTA sites for urban and non-urban areas, I computed the number of GE hams per POTA site within each metro and urban category. This metric is a rough indication of the potential demand for access by these license holders. (This is not unlike corporate site-selection metrics.) The category where most POTA sites are located (shown above) is in the non-urban areas of metropolitan areas. There are 14.9 GE hams per site there. For the inner city urban area of metros, there are many more GE hams, some 280.5 per POTA site! This shows the tremendous potential contention for those sites as Ivan WC2S and Kevin KW6E described in our Zoom conference. It also illustrates the tremendous market for park availability for them to activate should local parks be available.
Smaller isolated micropolitan areas also have a much smaller market, but it depends on the urban status of POTA sites and GE hams. There are 122.1 hams per POTA site in Micropolitan urban areas but only 8.8 in the non-urban regions within them. This reflects another spatial location for park contention and a market for potential expansion to local parks.
The non-metropolitan counties, commonly called America’s rural areas, have another substantial urban gap. In urban areas in non-metro counties, generally thought of as small towns, have ten-fold more hams-per-site (64.3) as those in the non-urbannon-metro areas (6.0). These data show the stark lack of accessibility by urban-based GE hams regardless of whether they are in metro, micro or non-metropolitan zones.
What is the Overall Accessibility to Parks for GE Hams?
While these results make a strong case that urban hams with GE credentials are not well-served by the POTA program, questions remain. How far are they from POTA sites versus local municipal parks? The two histograms above do show a prominent disparity favoring local parks. Moreover, are there cases where POTA sites are closer to GE hams than municipal parks? Remember, it is about the relative spatial proximity of sites to hams.
In the earlier section on major city profiles, I used the convex hull polygon to illustrate how large or small the spatial distance was for each GE ham in the area to POTA versus municipal parks. The area in square miles within those polygons represents the closeness that each type of park is to GE hams for which it is the closest entity. The table below is a summary of that nationwide analysis.
It should not be surprising that the average area in the convex hull representing the nearest park service zone, whether using to the mean or median, is much smaller for municipal parks than POTA sites. This shows how the “friction of distance” is far less for municipal parks because that is where most GE hams are located! The average area for POTA sites is 118 square miles while for municipal parks it is one-fifth that at only 20 square miles. The median, where one-half of the parks are above and below the figure, is 52 for POTA sites and 0.3 for municipal parks. These patterns are rather dramatic by comparison. However, the minimum and maximum illustrate that there are also very large municipal parks (max = 6,652 vs 4,031 for POTA).
Compare the area of the convex hull above to the average distance from the same set of GE hams to POTA vs municipal parks in the line chart below. The urban area effect is clear by comparing the red and blue lines in each chart. The lines depict the difference between urban and non-urban areas in the average distance to the nearest POTA and municipal parks. The three charts pertain respectively to metropolitan areas, micropolitan areas and non-metropolitan counties with urban areas within them. This summary of average (crow flies) travel distance illustrates the three-part elements of the locations of POTA sites, municipal parks and GE hams. It takes all three components to best understand accessibility.
In urban metro areas, for example, the average distance to a municipal park is under two miles. It is over seven miles to the nearest POTA site. All of the urban average distances are about the same regardless of metropolitan classification as for non-urban distances across these metropolitan categories. Thus, for the continental U.S., municipal parks are closer to GE hams than area POTA sites by several miles on the average. The sole exception occurs in the most rural locations, non-urban non-metro areas, where POTA sites tend to be located themselves and are therefore closer.
Are there any POTA sites that are closer to GE hams than municipal parks? Well, yes there are. But not that many in the scope of the full set of licensed hams. Here is why I say that.
The pie charts above show the results for comparisons where POTA sites are closer to individual GE hams than their closest municipal parks. The results are further indications of the spatial mismatch of GE hams and POTA sites with municipal parks being situated in urban areas. Few POTA sites are closer in urban metro areas (8.6%) but more so in non-urban ones (16.1%). Most all municipal parks are closer in for urban metro hams (91.4%). This reverses in Micropolitan areas as almost a third (33.1%) of POTA sites are closer in the non-urban areas there. This drops to about one-fifth for urban micropolitan cities (19.3%). Finally, for non-metropolitan counties, a similar pattern occurs with a fourth (28%) having hams with POTA sites closer than municipal ones. This is not the case in rural areas with urban centers (small towns). Some 93 percent (92.8%) have municipal parks nearby with only some 7 percent (7.2%) with POTA sites being closer. I hasten to remind the reader that the greatest concentration of GE hams is not in rural or suburban areas but in the urban zones of metropolitan areas.
What Have We Learned About the Location of Hams and POTA Sites?
The rather elaborate results show that urban General and Extra Class hams are significantly under-served in access to the POTA program’s current park entities. These parks are just not where the hams live. Booking a longer period of time for portable ham operations is required for GE hams in the largest metropolitan urban centers. I’ll hasten to add that some 62 percent of GE hams live in those areas. There is also time contention for sparse urban sites where there are many hams who want to activate them. Ask Kevin K6WE who lives in Silicon Valley. He has an alert set just to let him spot activators in the single POTA site in his general area. Why? So he won’t pack his gear and drive to one of them only to find RF contention for his transceiver from other hams doing an activation. This scenario is due to the spatial locations of POTA sites, the concentrations of GE hams in urban centers, and the much longer drive times in the transportation networks in those areas.
A classic spatial mismatch interpretation fits these results. By and large, POTA sites are not where the most General and Extra amateur operators live. Thus, POTA sites are activated mostly by a small group of extreme activators and in a small group of POTA sites. The majority of activators in 2025 reported 5 or less such successful trips (median number). (This is from the Snapshot article.) This mismatch is not purely a result of POTA Inc. making intentional choices. Indeed, the National Parks program in the U.S. represents some of our earliest protected lands (thank President Theodore Roosevelt). They were intentionally located in what was then more isolated areas away from urban centers. Adding a mix of state-owned and managed park sites by POTA Inc. merely increased the mixture of official POTA sites that are outside of the larger urban metro centers where most GE hams live.
Even though unintentional, the official list of POTA sites does fly in the face of consumer behavior by ham operators. The well-established “friction of distance” does guide consumer choice, such as choosing a park to activate in POTA (or perhaps, not activate at all). But is it a problem? Can’t urban-based hams just drive to a POTA site and enjoy the countryside? Yes, they can. Obviously, some do. But it does come at a price for the majority of POTA-activating ham operators. For those hams who participated in POTA activations during 2025, my statistical modeling results show that for every mile further the nearest POTA site is, hams activated one-half fewer times during the year (i.e., a reduction of 0.5 activations per mile). This suggests more study 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.
One large issue not directly addressed here are Technician Class licensees. They account for about half of all licensed amateurs in the Continental U.S. (49.1%). Yet, only two percent of them reported POTA activations in all of 2025. This is a topic for further study in future articles.
What can be done? Some ardent POTA fans would (and have on Reddit) say, “Shut up and operate.” Wow. That attitude leads to consternation, frustration and, likely, a movement to solve the problem through competitive means in the marketplace. What do I mean by this? POTA Inc. has said in writing to Ivan WC2S that adding local parks to their system is not going to happen. That is certainly their corporate choice and I for one am not asking them to by implication of these research results. Perhaps it is beyond their technical capability to handle these many more parks. For whatever the underlying reason, they have spoken and they are not going to undertake this.
Is it worth a grassroots movement to launch an independent “park activation” program for local parks? It might be but that coming to fruition remains to be seen. I hope this article has provided some data-driven facts for consideration to those interested in portable operation in parks across the U.S. It’s a great activity space that should be more accessible to all.
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