Parks on the Air
parksontheair.com
parksontheair.com
It's real easy to get your Technician class license in the US, which will get you limited line of sight range via VHF/UHF and a few other misc. bands. General class unlocks High Frequency operation which allows you to talk around the globe with the right radio.
For my field operations, I use a handheld 12V battery pack and a (tr)uSDX, a souped-up ATMega platform that does QRP (<=5W power) operations via CW (Morse code) and SSB (voice). It's the cheapest radio out there that will reliably do (passable) quality SSB, and it's real handy to have something so tiny and light when I'm heading out to hike up a mountain.
This is everything I take into the field, and have talked to people states and countries away when geomagnetic conditions were favorable (being on top of a mountain helps haha): https://i.imgur.com/HOx5buc.jpeg
Full kit breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/ultralightish-tr-usdx-sota-shack-b...
Do you take both up? Fishing in mountain lakes and SSB to pass the time sound fun do to simultaneously.
POTA is amazing because it lets me toss up a temporary antenna on any arbitrary weekend and still have a good chance of making a few SSB contacts. Especially now with the solar cycle at its maximum.
Thank you to all the people who go and activate parks! You are awesome!
And if you don't have a radio, and want to hear the conversations, check out a web SDR like this one: https://www.sdrutah.org/
Worth noting that it's not just nationwide, it's global. :)
It'll work where morse code will not-- FT8 has on the order of 6dB over morse though obviously that depends on operator skill.
Our setup isn't really all that fancy, he takes one of his normal radios and with the help of some kind of special adapter, connects it directly to one of those big 12v deep cycle marine batteries. Antenna wise we have this triple magnet mounting thing that we drop on the top of his truck, and one of us (meaning me) screws one of several different band specific Ham sticks. We usually just stick to 20m because that seems to be where most people are. Logging is usually just me writing stuff down manually on a legal pad, but this last time he found a logging app that seemed to support POTA specifically so we just used that on a laptop connected to my phone's hotspot feature.
I typically use an Elecraft KX2 and Chelegance MC-750 vertical (and you'd be hard pressed to get me to switch to another antenna. Sure, an EFHW packs up small, but getting it up in a tree requires more time/effort/kit)
I've also activated with a truSDX, QMX, and MTR3b. Behind my KX2, the QMX is a great little CW radio. The truSDX is alright, but the QMX is superior.
I have my POTA kit ready for when I am. A QMX with an EFHW. I'm not looking forward to throwing it in a tree though, so I'm also looking at verticals. The QMX is awesome. At home I have a G90 and a Ten-Tec Corsair.
Curious to see your activation videos. What's your channel?
> Welcome to the Parks on the Air(POTA) site for international portable amateur radio operations that promote emergency awareness and communications from national/federal and state/provincial level parks.
The first part, alright, but the second part? Why are we promoting using a ham radio within a national/state level park? Why is there "awards" (certificates mostly) for doing this? Why is this work important?
For those in the "in-group" I'm sure this all makes complete sense. For me, I don't get it.
I think if you look at things like Niantic it's a similar two-for-one appeal: a motivating excuse to go someplace you would like to go but might not have otherwise gone and engaging in activity you like.
> I think if you look at things like Niantic it's a similar two-for-one appeal: a motivating excuse to go someplace you would like to go but might not have otherwise gone and engaging in activity you like.
I believe the GP is saying that it doesn't say what "it" is. AARL and Niantic aren't exactly household names outside of people already interested in radio.
If they're trying to attract new people to amateur radio with this as floatrock surmised, (and maybe they're not! and if not, maybe they should be?), you need to assume this is going to be people's first point of contact... and this website isn't particularly useful for that use case.
I think there is assumption that visitor would know what Summits on the Air is since that is better known.
Communication isn't just putting the information out there, it's about sharing the good feelings people get from doing ham stuff. If there's a charismatic amateur radio youtuber or something that's way more about the joy of using radio rather than the nitpicky details even experienced hams find tiring, I haven't encountered them. They probably need to do some serious promotion. Lot's of old farts like to think young people just aren't technical enough or don't have the discipline: it's bullshit. Compare how many technical workers there are today vs 40 years ago. I'll bet 90% of what repels new hopeful hams from getting involved boils down to the curse of expertise, gatekeeping, and angry hall-monitorism among the most vocal people that haunt places that new folks might go for information. It's not just amateur radio that does this, but it might be the biggest offender I've seen at least since the Perl newsgroups in the late 90s.
The slightly funny thing here for me is that Niantic has nothing to do with radio at all! They made Pokémon GO, the augmented reality "find Pokémon in the real world" app that was pretty popular a few years ago :D
1. Hams develop highly technical skills while interacting socially.
2. With entry low cost and no subscription fees, hams have global communication abilities without cellular, internet, and power grids.
3. Hams support community, often with important emergency comms roles during disasters, war, or search and rescue efforts.
Why parks? They're easily accessed. They're free. They're visible to newcomers who wouldn't otherwise know amateur radio could be fun and social.
(There is actually a lot more to operating in a Situation beyond just being able to turn the radio on and tune it, but even just getting a radio on the right channel is a challenge for a lot of people without some practice).
So "emergency comms from parks" appeals to preppers and outdoorsy folks (who skew younger), and maybe gives a reason for the young nerds to go outside. It ain't darts or cornhole or spikeball, but it's on that spectrum of sport if you look at it the right way.
(None of this is meant to be anything against ham radio... there's been some great stories out of NC where it was the hams who kept comms running after Helene knocked out power and cell towers. And honestly, there's a certain ultimate-freedom beauty to a communication medium where you don't need to pay anyone a subscription, you're not using someone else's wires, and the only firewall is what the sun is doing to the ionosphere today. Just hard to compete for attention in the dopamine tsunami world of xbox and youtube and arduinos.)
No disagreement with the rest but that point is a bit of a shepard tone... you can find people making the "it's a bunch of old guys who are dying out" comment in amateur radio publications 50 years ago, confirmed by netcraft no doubt.
There are more license holders than ever-- a decrease vs the total population, yes, but as a licensee the total number matters more than the share of the population.
(If anything, the utility of the skill is increased by decreasing percentage of the population but improved by increasing total numbers: E.g. in an emergency there will be plenty of people to contact, but also more people who benefit from your assistance)
It's true that tech like the internet has diminished some interest in radio, but OTOH computing technology and the overall decrease in real cost of sophisticated electronics has significantly supercharged radio.
Hams tend to be older because of free time, disposable income, ownership of property where you can put up an antenna, and other such considerations... and because its one of relative few socially-interactive hobbies that you can still participate in even from a hospital bed.
I wonder if online video games will eventually share a similar fate? Once your typical 80 year old is someone who grew up playing online games will online games be significantly overrun by old farts? :P
There's no "work," it's just another part of the ham radio hobby.
Why? People like making radio contacts with people in novel places. People like setting up their radio in cool places.
There is some gameification, and points gained for activating and chasing. The points get you nothing, not everyone even records them.
Does that work?
Summits-on-the-Air, Parks-on-the-Air, and others involve going out and operating a portable station (the activator). The reason why parks are a good place to operate is that they have open spaces, trees, etc that are good for deploying antennas. You also don't generally need permission like you would with a school field for instance. Operating portable is great for people that live in an apartment or condo where they can't put up an antenna.
The emergency aspect is having the gear and practice for operating portable like one might have to do in an emergency.
In the end, it is about fun and using your equipment and skills in different ways.
Some people enjoy restoring and operating antique equipment. Some people enjoy designing and building homebrew gear. Some people enjoy the challenge of working esoteric propagation modes, like bouncing signals off thunderstorms or aurorae or the moon, or relaying through the ISS or a handful of dedicated artificial satellites.
Some people emphasize the rock-bottom reliability of the technology. Two people with appropriate gear and knowledge can communicate with each other, and do so completely independently of any third-party infrastructure. This was a total superpower up until about 30 years ago, and remains appealing when thinking about emergency scenarios.
Some people are naturally competitive and will make a game of anything possible. These people have invented awards -- along with various pseudo-regulatory bodies to allocate same -- for things like making a radio contact on each of the seven continents, or for contacting the most people within a designated 48h period, or many other feats defined by various -- largely arbitrary -- rules.
POTA is one such set of rules. The "national/state level park" aspect is just to put some constraints on the competition. As others have pointed out, this is basically the same as niantic forcing you to get off your couch and walk down the block to the churchtower before you can catch a pokemon.
This requirement bleeds a little into the previous point, since it necessitates a portable rig (either human-carried or mounted to a vehicle of some sort). Such a rig would be more useful in a hypothetical emergency comms scenario than one that requires mains electricity, a power amp the size of a filing cabinet, and a 30m antenna bolted to the side of your house that just burned down.
But yeah, in the end it's basically Pokemon Go that requires custom hardware and uses national/state parks in lieu of defining their own map of pokespots.
POTA is very laid back. Only the party in the park even needs to log.
> But yeah, in the end it's basically Pokemon Go that requires custom hardware and uses national/state parks in lieu of defining their own map of pokespots.
parks are also at least little interesting, I've learned about a lot of parks that I never would have known about just due to looking them up when I see stations operating out of them.
Also POTA (and other such contact collecting activities) provide an opportunity to practice your radio skills and use your equipment without the risk of getting involved in conversations you're not interested in or don't have time for. It's not rude to not get into a conversation, 'cause you're trying to rack up contacts and there are people waiting!
One of the top reasons against amateur radio I hear from non-hams is that they don't have anything to talk to other hams about. Turns out there is plenty to do without having a conversation on the radio.
(Of course, for people who want to converse there are plenty of opportunities to do that-- opportunities that are enhanced by contact collecting activities that do a lot to explore what locations are reachable.)