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Big news — I’m proud to announce that the Second Edition of my book VHF, Summits, and More is now available. I’ve received tons of positive feedback on the first edition, published in 2019, and I decided it was time for an update. This new version is printed in color, which greatly enhances the photos and graphics.

This book is an easy-to-understand introduction to VHF/UHF ham radio with an emphasis on mountaintop VHF operation. I’ve enjoyed ham radio and writing about it ever since I received my first FCC license. Although I’ve used the ham bands from 160m to 10cm (10 GHz), I find the VHF and higher frequencies the most interesting. This is mainly because of the interplay between mountains, Height Above Average Terrain (HAAT), and VHF propagation. VHF has lots of spectrum, lots of modes, and lots of fun challenges.

For the second edition, I gave everything a fresh look. I updated every chapter and added 100 pages of new material. In Part I, the VHF tutorial section, I added new chapters to improve the treatment of basic VHF/UHF: Popular VHF/UHF Bands, Antennas, Coaxial Cables & Connectors, and WSJT-X Digital Modes. Part II covers topics that originated from my blog, often based on questions I hear from newer hams.  In Part III, which is focused on SOTA, I added several chapters on how to be successful doing VHF SOTA, and I added a few new trip reports. I also added some information on combined SOTA/POTA activations.

The book is available in two formats: a color print edition and a Kindle edition, both available from Amazon. The print version ships immediately; the Kindle version will follow shortly.

Order your copy now. Operators are standing by.
(Actually, just use the Amazon site.)

73 Bob K0NR

The post Second Edition of VHF, Summits, and More appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

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.

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.

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.

A few days ago, someone told me that a rumor is circulating that I don’t own any gear capable of operating on the high-frequency (HF) bands. I laughed out loud, wondering where this came from.

Actually, I know where this comes from: most of my postings here at k0nr.com are oriented towards VHF operating, often from the top of a summit. I fully admit that VHF/UHF has always been my favorite part of the amateur radio spectrum.

And I do operate on the HF bands.

Home Station

The photo above shows my ham shack set up at home. The primary transceiver is an ICOM IC-7610, which covers the HF bands and 6 meters. To the left is an ICOM IC-9700 that I use for 2m, 70cm, and 23cm. An ACOM 1000 linear amplifier sits at the far left. It is usually configured for 6m, just waiting for the band to open.

Here is a closer look at the two transceivers. Hey, look at that, the IC-7610 is listening to 20m CW. Yes, I even operate CW.

My antenna farm includes two towers but they are used for VHF/UHF antennas. For the HF bands, I use wire antennas. This article describes the end-fed wire antenna I have been using for the past 5 years. It covers 40m through 6m with one antenna.

Operating Results

I run hot and cold on chasing DX, but over time, I have made many DX contacts and worked quite a few countries. I favor the DX potential of the higher bands: 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m, and 10m. Recently, I discovered that the 30m band can be a lot of fun, too. My current stats are: 205 DXCC Entities and 39 (out of 40) CQ Zones. Still looking to work Zone 34, Northeastern Africa. I’ve also been working on Worked All States (WAS) for each band, having completed 40m, 30m, 20m, 17m, and 6m.

Going Portable with HF

Joyce/K0JJW and I often operate portable on the HF bands, almost always a Parks On The Air (POTA) activation. Our favorite radio for POTA is a Yaesu FT-991, which covers the HF bands along with VHF/UHF. Almost all of the POTA work is on HF but sometimes we do make a few VHF contacts.

We also have an ICOM IC-705, also covering all bands, and is especially useful for backpack portability. We favor VHF/UHF for SOTA but sometimes we will use the IC-705 to make some HF SOTA contacts.  We have a variety of wire antennas, all different types of end-fed designs. The IC-705 does not have a built-in antenna tuner, so we take along a small manual tuner.

Wrap Up

So there you have it, I do have some HF gear and I do use it!

Remember, the universal purpose of amateur radio is to have fun messing around with radios. Using whatever amateur band you choose.

73 Bob K0NR

The post Confirming K0NR Does Have HF Equipment appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Ground-mounted verticals are all the rage these days in portable HF operations. This is particularly true in POTA activations. We all like to get extra mileage out of our verticals in terms of their frequency range and efficiency, no?

One method is to add an inductor to the radiating element to extend what its length looks like for RF resonance. Some versions of this are to bottom-load the vertical (Wolf River Coils does this with their Sporty Forty coil) as well as center-load it (as does Chelegance does with some of their JPC line of verticals). There are top-loaded designs, too.

An issue the portable HF operator might face if they create their own vertical antenna system is determining the value of the inductor coil. I’ll walk through this briefly to illustrate one problem that many vendors create for them in their product offerings.

Shown above is a center-loaded vertical that I’ve designed. It’s called the Eiffeltenna because of the similarity to the Eiffel Tower from the tripod legs. The details will be forthcoming once it is fully tested but the focus in this article is is that it is center-loaded as the inset photo illustrates.

What inductance value should I use? It all depends on the band, height before the coil’s insertion, and the total height of the vertical itself. Oh, and the ground and counterpoise element can play a role as well. Here, I’m using a 42″x35″ sheet of Faraday Cloth on a washed gravel driveway next to my garage. While this is far from good ground conditions, it functions very well as shown in an RF sweep below.

There are a number of calculators to help hams answer these questions. One is from 66pacific.com. I’ve placed a screenshot of the calculations for this test antenna below. The design goals are for the 40 meter band (7.0 MHz). But I also want to get 20 meters available, too. The total height of the antenna is specified as 16.75′. The coil is inserted at 7.5′ so what is the value of the required inductor to make a 20 meter vertical resonant on 40 meters here? According to this calculator, we need a coil that measures 12.1 micro-Henries.

One option is to simply build a fixed (non-adjustable) coil for this value. There are many online coil calculators for this. It is a desirable option unless there might be another band or the ground counterpoise system is very different or something else that changes things here. The other option is to purchase a coil from a number of vendors. One gotcha: very, very few actually tell the customer the inductance value for their coil (or the range if it’s an adjustable one)! They usually just say it’s “for 40M” referring to their own commercial antenna product for which it is an accessory.

Since I have several coils like this, I used one of my calibrated bench LCR meters (HP 4275a @ 200 KHz) to measure the value or range of values for several commercially available inductor coils. The results are in the table below. I have included three adjustment settings for the variable coils and the Q value. One definition of Q is “The quality factor (Q factor) is defined as the ratio of reactance to resistance, indicating efficiency at a given frequency.” For us, the importance of Q is “A higher Q value signifies lower losses and better suitability for high-frequency applications, as it implies a smaller ratio of resistance to inductive reactance.” So Q is an additional measurement about that inductor’s value that shapes how effectively it works.

While the MFJ open-air coil is no longer being manufactured, it is in wide circulation in the amateur radio community. It has a wide range, from 0.4 to 17.1 uH with corresponding Q values of 0.5 to 5.8. While the Mad Dog adjustable coil (sturdily built, I might add) has a wider range (0.73 to 28.3), it has somewhat low Q values (0.3 to 0.6). The Chelegance JPC-7 also has a wide range of inductance settings, from 0.5 to 22.8. Like the Mad Dog coil, the JPC-7 Q values are not great at 0.33 to 0.18 (double checked this figure). Here’s where one coil, larger than the rest, shines in this table. The Wolf River Coils Silver Bullet 1000 has values from 2.73 to 80.3, allowing a larger frequency range for loaded vertical antennas. Equally impressive is that the Q values range from 4.3 to 13.5 at the same time. All of these adjustable coils would fit the requirement of adding a 12.1 uH value at the center point of the vertical antenna shown above.

I included another coil from Wolf River, their fixed value Sporty Forty. They don’t tell the buyer what value it is, just that it’s an accessory for their ground-mounted whip antennas to get them to also work on 40 meters. I have two and they’re well built. Their value is 8.3 uH. There is a clone from China that is also 8.3 uH. Perhaps because of different manufacturing processes, the WRC coil has a much higher Q value at 8.6 than the clone from China has at 2.5. For these fixed value coils, it is key to realize what inductance value they have because neither would work in the center-loaded vertical example used here.

There is a very neat “bypass” trick created by Michael KB9VBR, published on his Youtube Channel. My version is shown at left. It’s simply a set of pigtails attached at the top and bottom of the coil with Power Pole connectors on each end. Plug them together, the coil is bypassed. Unplug them, and it’s in the driven element. Takes about 15 minutes or so with materials that you likely already have it you’re an antenna builder. If not, these parts are very inexpensive via online vendors.

This bypass trick can be used with any inductor coil so keep it in mind if you build a center-loaded vertical like I’ve done here. I don’t have to bring down the full vertical whip by unscrewing it, physically removing the coil, and replacing the whip. I can just reach up, plug or unplug the pigtails, and the vertical is either on 20 or 40 meters. This assumes that I’ve already done two things in the case of the Eiffeltenna center-loaded vertical.

Getting it tuned spot-on for 20 meters is fairly easy using the Faraday Cloth for the counterpoise field. It is a precursor for switching in the adjustable coil, such as the JPC-7, as shown above in my driveway. This is so that the coil can than then be adjusted to the correct uH value to load the antenna for 40 meters using an antenna analyzer. Once this is accomplished, marking the coil makes the process almost automatic during setup in the field. Checking it with an antenna analyzer, though, is always a good thing (ask me how I know, lol).

These vertical antennas can be configured in many ways but I hope that this article is useful to the portable operator who wants to operate with multiple band options using a quick setup vertical antenna. The Eiffeltenna, inspired by a tripod experiment published by Jim W6LG on his popular Youtube Channel, and further work by Jason VE5REV, fits that bill. Extend the tripod, add the coil and whip, placed it on the Faraday Cloth rectangle, connect the ground wire to the Cloth and the coax, and you are largely ready to go.

I’ll be publishing more about this very portable antenna once I’ve completed testing it. However, getting a load of the principles in this article applies to many, many vertical antennas. Get a the load of the coil you’re buying before the purchase!

Many of you already know about this wonderful alert tool: HamAlert. From the HamAlert website:

HamAlert is a system that allows you to get notifications when a desired station appears on the DX cluster, the Reverse Beacon Network, SOTAwatch, POTA, WWFF Spotline, or PSK Reporter. No need to keep checking these resources manually if you’re looking for a certain callsign, DXCC, CQ zone, IOTA island, SOTA summit or WWFF/POTA reference.

HamAlert is quite versatile, allowing you to tune its alerts to meet your needs. You do this by defining triggers that, well, trigger an alert. I won’t cover all of the possibilities here, but I will show you how I have my triggers set:

Most of these are just ham friends and family that I want to keep track of, see when they are on the air: K0JJW, KF9EY, KB9DPF, & W0BV. W0BV is a special case because he is an active DXer not too far from me, so it is helpful to see what he’s doing on 6 meters and HF. W0CLA and KV0CO are the callsigns of clubs I belong to. For these callsigns, the trigger is set for any activity on any band.

K0GU is a noted 6m enthusiast in Colorado that I follow because if something is happening on 6m, he is usually in the mix. (A major part of the challenge of 6 meters is knowing when the band opens.)

Probably the most important trigger for me is the Summit Association W0C, which alerts me whenever a SOTA activation is spotted in Colorado (W0C). I am only interested in working Activators on VHF/UHF, but I set the trigger for any band. Many times, activators are spotted only on HF, but they may still operate VHF/UHF. Similar to this is the POTA trigger for parks in Colorado. I just want to be alerted to park activations happening only in my state.

I have my callsign K0NR on the list because it is helpful to know where I am getting spotted. This can be very helpful when trying to work DX or activating a SOTA summit. If I am looking for a particular DX callsign, entity (country) or zone, I can add that to this list as well. When we travel, I may adjust these for local activity, depending on the situation.

I generally set up the triggers via the web interface and then receive the Alerts on my iPhone, via the HamAlert app, as shown below.

Anyway, take a look at this handy app and let me know how you use it.

73 Bob K0NR

The post HamAlert Is My Friend appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.