Operating POTA with Contests

POTA stands for “Parks on the air”.

Parks on the air is to Ham radio like fantasy football is to real football. Basically, statistics about your contacts are kept and that maintains a scoreboard about how many parks you’ve contacted, how many have contacted you, etc.

Some people consider POTA its own mission, and are just active for that reason alone.

While that is fun, I prefer combining POTA with other contests by camping at a state park and setting up a station for a specific contest. Here are some things to consider:

• Contest time length, and/or overnight – if the contest is overnight, you may want to stay in a state park campground.
• Spotting – Spotting is to basically advertise your presence on the internet, so people can find you. Not all contests allow spotting – so only spot yourself if the rules allow it. Some contests have a category for “assisted” that applies to people who use spotting. Other contests fully allow, or fully disallow spotting.
• Iffy Internet – A lot of state parks are remote enough that they may not be within traditional cell phone coverage. Before you head out, make sure to have anything you might need downloaded already. That includes logging software, digital mode software, and any device drivers for the radios you plan to use. One thing that can help – sometimes parks have more than one campground loop at different elevations – if you are in a “higher” loop compared to a lower one, that can make a difference.

This past weekend, I did the ARRL international DX contest from Sibley state park in MN (K-2522) with another colleague. We both operated single-op stations in the contest.

Getting to the internet was a challenge – we had to raise our hotspot to the top of our tower (zip lock bag taped to rope on a pully). This gave us just enough internet to look up stations and/or check on our signals getting out, and we could take down the hotspot to charge it

When back at the base, upload the same log to both the contest site and parksontheair.com. Effectively 2x the fun for the same amount of time.

Keep in mind that to activate a park you need to have 10 contacts within the same UTC day. That can be used to your advantage to gain credit for multiple UTC days. Or, it can mess you up and leave you less than the number you need, if you’re not careful.

If you’re thinking about an excuse to bring our your portable gear or meet another ham for an activity, making plans for a POTA-contest may be just the thing.

-Tim Neu N0TJN