Like the “beer goggles” Rod - when the barmaid is serving you near closing time starts to look more attractive?!
73 Phil
I thought about doing this in the past but you had to email your logs to someone. Now that you can upload the log yourself I might do this. I think most of my activations are in the Yorkshire Dales National Park G-0208.
Hi Phil,
You’ll probably find me in your logs for a few of those POTAs - I’ve been combining SOTA and POTA for a while where I can. Haven’t been able to convince Nic to take part yet though, she’s more interested in SOTA uniques.
Speak soon & 73, Simon.
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I guess I can go back to 2005 when I started doing SOTA activations and I could submit 100s of activations in the Lake District and elsewhere, if I could be bothered, but friends such as @G4YSS can go back to operating in the Dales, Lake District and Scotland long before that. It seems odd that the POTA MT allow activations to count before their scheme was even conceived, but it is not a discussion to be had on the SOTA reflector to my mind.
73 Phil G4OBK
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I’ve enjoyed doing a few POTA activations, they have one big advantage over SOTA that there are parks all over the UK, so I don’t have to travel for 5 hours like I have to do for SOTA (I’m not counting Wendover Woods as a place worth visiting - I’ve seen more interesting non-SOTA lumps elsewhere to operate from).
If you don’t live near mountains but want to test out homemade portable antennas a POTA location can be an ideal spot, with the added bonus that on the higher bands you are almost certainly going to be chased by stateside hunters, it’s always nice to get a bit of DX in the log.
I’m probably odd in that I’ve never seen the attraction to first activations unless there’s some physical challenge to it. If it’s an almost drive up 2 pointer for example, what would make the first activation any different than the 1000th? As Phil says people have probably operated radio from spots like that for decades.
Jonathan
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That happened to me. I did a “first activation” of a POTA site last year (mentioned in the first post above) but a few months later someone uploaded an earlier log which dated from before the POTA site was even created. It had been a WWFF site previously so they used this log. I did query this with the POTA folk but they said it was within the rules. That and another odd incident have somewhat put me off POTA but I may try again some time.
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Depends where you operated from. The AZ is huge and there’s some very nice viewpoints to various directions from which to operate… If it was next to the rather ordinary “summit cairn” in the woods (or even the trig point) you’ve been short changed…
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Sounds like an APRS2POTA could be useful in some cases.
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A surprisingly low number of parks considering how active you are Phil.
I checked LogSearch on World Wide Flora and Fauna and found a few more for you. 669 in total - and seven continents worked. Well done!
73, Gerard
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Hi Gerard,
Thanks for your contribution highlighting this.
That sounds like an unrealised big chaser score I have in World Wide Flora and Fauna, but I don’t know what the connection between WWFF and POTA is as they are two different award schemes, with different rules and places of interest. I’m sure like as with SOTA activation zones, there is some overlap with some places of interest falling into several “OTA” schemes. Perhaps you could enlighten me. I only started looking at POTA because I live two miles from a National Park and a few miles further than that in the other direction to the edge of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).
73 Phil G4OBK
PS Edit - I just checked, we have 15 National Parks in the UK and 46 AONBs.
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Some POTA refs overlap too - for instance, the Kinder Low trig point near the true summit of Kinder Scout can be simultaneously counted for:
SOTA G/SP-001
POTA G-0048 Peak District National Park
POTA G-0174 Kinder Scout NNR
WWFF GFF-0014 Peak District National Park
WWFF GFF-0381 Kinder Scout NNR
WAB SK08
WAB trigs TP4216
IARU IO93
IOTA EU-005
…if you can be bothered!
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Aye, there’s the rub. CQ CQ SOTA POTA WWFF WAB IOTA DE … 
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The CQ call inconvenience pales into insignificance compared with the logging!
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These are excellent examples showing that nobody needs POTA. Looking at the DL map, there are dozens of POTA references where WWFF references have been for years. Nothing but a cheapo “buy American!” copy of a well-working award scheme.
Ahoi
Pom
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I’m not sure I agree.
The systems, resources and marketing of POTA seems significantly better than WWFF. Anyway, it’s good to have competition to keep you on your toes and ahead of the game. That’s why SOTA MT appreciates the existence of GMA and HEMA so much.
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There are no GMA - SOTA cross references. If a summit is SOTA listed, it’s not a GMA reference. Not sure about HEMA, but I think it’s the same.
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GMA, that’s a new one. What is it?
Exactly Tom, and the detective work needed to be sure that the place where the SOTA you activated (Such as Kinder Scout, I been there twice) falls within the KInder Scout NNR. Some of the mapping for that type of POTA can be vague and slightly unclear. I haven’t looked at that one yet. Ailsa Craig is a counter, as is Cairnsmoor of Fleet. Not sure about other parts of Galloway that I have visited many times. Its all very time consuming and something to look at when I’ve nowt else to do - completing numerous POTA activations without even leaving the shack! I’m giving WWFF a total swerve, I agree with you the documention and web tools don’t compare with the POTA. Nothing is as good as SOTA though. Cannot count IOTA, that is a different kettle of fish altogether. I believe it was the very first “OTA” programme.
73 Phil G4OBK
73 Phil
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Hi Phil,
This mapping tool is excellent for clarifying the boundaries of English parks:
Magic Map Application (defra.gov.uk)
There is also a Welsh version, although it seems to lack the detail of the Magic Map:
Geocortex Viewer for HTML5 (cyfoethnaturiolcymru.gov.uk)
73, Simon
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For ZL we have all those details available at https://ontheair.nz.
For VK, likewise http://parksnpeaks.org will give you the equivalence between schemes.
It was a very trivial task to run a point-in-polygon search to determine which POTA, WWFF, ZLOTA sites each SOTA summit lies in.
A slightly more complex query also returned overlaps between POTA, WWFF and ZLOTA parks / lakes / islands. I think I fudged that one and counted anything with >95% overlap as being ‘within’ the other site to cope with minor boundary discrepancies.
I suggest someone should run and publish such a lookup for your country too. The postgis database package has all the required functions, so it can be done on-the-fly, or you could use a GIS package to generate and publish a snapshot.
Matt - ZL4NVW
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