The Magic Map site is brilliant. It is a bit complicated but once you’ve worked out how to get it to display the boundaries of the reserve it is ideal.
This screenshot might help. It showed me that I could activate Wistman’s Wood from high ground above it.
The SOTA reference for a summit is also its GMA reference. The same for HEMA summits.
I did three POTA activations while back in Northumberland, UK over the Xmas holidays. I enjoyed it despite freezing my buns off sitting on the Northumberland Coast and River Tweed.
As a US program one attraction for me was teh large number of NA operators that responded to my CQ which I liked not least of which it helps with my WAS phone goal from my home location. My Baby Loop with 400w performs worst than 80w and a Buddipole, or so it seems.
A visiting friend recently “persuaded” me to drive him, my Jeep and my radio to numerous SoCal POTA spots. I was amazed by how many contacts he got and think this it is a great program that offers people a chance to operate from the wilderness who might not feel comfortable atop a mountain.
Describing this as a “cheapo American ripoff” or some such language is rather dismissive and ill informed. As of writing this and within a 5 minute period, 50 activators are out and about in NA. That’s a good thing.
Paul
Paul is correct Parks on the Air® (POTA) started in early 2017 when the ARRL’s National Parks on the Air special event ended. A group of volunteers wanted to continue the fun beyond the one-year event, and thus, POTA was born. (From the POTA website)
Part of the attraction of POTA is that no hiking is required; folks can operate from a vehicle or RV which makes the “activation” very accessible for a majority of hams who can not (or choose not) to hike into a SOTA summit with a self-contained, portable station.
I thoroughly enjoyed the NPOTA 2016 event as it took me to locations I might never have gone to. W6PNG and I had a wonderful 10-day NPOTA “expedition” through out the Northwest!
Guy
Indeed we did Guy @N7UN. Lots of memorable events including activating a great sounding POTA entity; Dismal Nitch and also a park that makes Yosemite look like a pedestrian mistake; North Cascade NP.
I remember sharing a few pints with you guys when you made it down to Seapac! I got a picture around here somewhere of you Paul trying to help guy install the new heatsink on his KX2 
Refresh me memory; Did Guy get it done that night, or we were well into the Pints, and the job had to be completed the next day! Still looking for you pic Paul…
73, Todd
I remember those beers!!
Here’s the other picture of what you and Guy (@N7UN ) were pointing at …it was a message to Scott (@AK6Q) …KX2 fixed that evening or next day.
When I saw the other thread about Etienne (@K7ATN) and the picture dating from SeaPac 2015 made me think of out 2016 attendance.
This is the only picture I have of me there along with Etienna and Darryl (@ww7d) and as I was the W6 AM this represented the entire Western US Coast’s AMs (for whatever that was worth!!)
You can tell I’m a Brit as we weren’t fed as much in the 50/60s versus our US brethren!!
Hi Phil,
your enthusiasm for POTA has awakened my dormant interest again. I now have a 20m mobile antenna to go with it. Because POTA from the car is legal and is fun even in storms and rain.
And I only have to drive 5km instead of 50km, really environmentally friendly!
I hope you - and of course everyone else - can chase me today for the points account.
73 Chris
WWFF started in 2012 based on World Flora & Fauna (WFF) launched in 2008 and now covers 188 countries. POTA started in 2018 with similar rules and now covers 90 countries. POTA parks initially came from WWFF parks however over time extra types of parks were allowable. WWFF requires parks to be IUCN Protected Areas. There’s a database on Protected Planet.
In England (G) there are 513 WWFF parks and 659 POTA parks including deletions. I would expect every England WWFF park to be included in POTA, but not vice-versa.
WWFF and POTA use different park references. There is a Windows conversion program called mParks Converter that I use frequently for converting my WWFF log to a POTA log. It covers several countries such as VK, VE, JA, ZL and K. I’m not sure if a conversion table is available for the UK yet. My contacts are logged with WWFF references then the app is used to create a new log for POTA. The app also works in the other direction: POTA → WWFF. With this app one can participate equally in both parks programs.
There may be a similar app for converting SOTA references to WWFF (or POTA) references.
73, Gerard
In cold and wet weather today was the best opportunity to activate Pota again. Park DA-0312 5km from my QTH in downtown Hanover has never been activated.
Although I could have easily thrown my EFHW into the trees there, I instead put my new 20m mobile antenna on the car roof. A DIAMOND HF-20FX for a slim €75.00 connected to my beloved KX2.
First a problem-free arranged qso with Lars, SA4BLM with straight key (our current favourite).
Then a Pota spot with 8 chasers mostly from Spain.
The highlight, however, was the 4 easily reached summits G/LD-058 CW with Colin
M1BUU, YO/EC-058 SSB with Mihaela YO5MCM and SV/TL-086 SSB with the tireless Stavros SV2RUJ.
The KX2 tunes my 20m ant on 30m and brought me G/LD-047 CW with Andy G8CPZ also.
I didn’t think you could do that with a 1.2m mobile antenna and without the formidable /P.
73 Chris
Now I have 4 antennas on the car roof.
FM/AM for radio, 2m/70cm for local, small 70cm for LoRa APRS and in the foreground the 20m
POTA do not permit municipally owned/managed parks. WWFF do, so long as they meet the IUCN requirements. So you may see some parks in WWFF that cannot be added to POTA where municipalities / local councils run conservation parks.
Matt
The rules for POTA are very US-centric.
All new parks must be owned and operated by a State/Provincial or Federal/National agency. We do not include parks that have part/shared ownership, sponsorship, or are operated by private organizations or local governments
On that basis most of the UK parks are not eligible. For example, our national parks are not owned by any public body. The vast majority of the land is privately owned. However, there is a large network of public footpaths and a right to acess over much of the land (with different rules in different nations of the UK).
I am sure that operating from any publicly accessible part of these parks is within the spirit of the programme but they ought to make their rules more global.
As I understand it there are separate MTs for each country and they can set their own local criteria. For example, the whole of Dartmoor National Park is a POTA site ) G-0349) even though the land has multiple owners, some private, a lot is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall plus the Ministry of Defence and the National Trust. Similarly the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), G-0231 is another with multiple owners.
The main criteria is you have to operate from land open to the public. So when I lived in the AONB my garden was in the AONB but I could not have made a valid POTA activation from it as it wasn’t open to the public.
Interesting. Weve been getting ZL parks into both schemes in the last 2 years now that we have active MTs - ZL1BQD (POTA) and VK5PAS (WWFF). But for both schemes have been following the letter of the global rules.
That said, with >30% of ZL in crown-owned conservation land and ~35000 govt registered parks, the trick is finding consistent rules to limit the list, not add to it!
Currently POTA has all parks over 1000ha and WWFF all parks over 5000ha (excluding regional parks). We are trying to achieve a 1:1 match in both schemes to make things easy.
Matt
And despite having a partly GLASS sunroof and reduced ground plane! Well done…
Nice report Chris - with summits worked, including Colin @M1BUU . I think I may conduct one POTA activation in March. From the home QTH garden of my stepdaughter when we are childminding at their house - she lives inside the POTA of G-0224 Howardian Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), 18 miles by road from the G4OBK QTH!
It does appear from the comments from John @M0WIV who has read the rules relating to location, that I may have to set up outside the garden where the road abuts a field boundary which is accessible to the public or put my mag mount on the roof of my car and operate on 2m… or even the childrens playpark down the road, ideally when there are no kids around.
73 Phil G4OBK
Only done one POTA, well it was more like a Car Park with a spare bit of ground next to it. Next time out on the hills I’ll see if I can combine it with SOTA, Wainwrights, HEMA, Worked all Britain etc.
Good to see that they have improved the log upload system though. Im still in the dark ages using paper and pen and trying to decode my bad handwriting!
I’m still mystified. POTA says I’ve chased 1466 activators in six countries, earning 28 awards. 99% of that is combined with SOTA and unknown to me at the time. No complaints. It’s free
Elliott, K6EL
I have now uploaded all my eligible SOTA activations to POTA. I am now the leading activator in the Yorkshire Dales National Park G-0208 but that’s only because there are very few activators in the UK.
I keep my log in Log4OM. I also have a spreadsheet where I record every SOTA activation with information such as equipment used and notes on the route used and the weather. I have added a column to say if I have uploaded to POTA. For each activation I use the QSO manager in Log4OM to export an ADIF for an activation and then upload this to POTA. It’s also possible to export and upload several summits at once, as long as they all used the same callsign and are from exactly the same POTA reference. I have had a couple of errors doing this - perhaps there were too many QSOs in the file - but it generally seems to work.
For the Yorkshire Dales National Park you have to say whether you are in North Yorkshire or Cumbria. For most summits this is obvious but I discovered that the county boundary runs right through the summit of Whernside G/NP-004 and Great Knoutberry Hill G/NP-015. Fortunately it’s obvious which side I activated from as there is a wall that follows the boundary.
One slight complication was dealing with activations which were in more than one POTA reference. For example, I uploaded Ben Ledi GM/SS-023 with the reference Queen Elizabeth Forest Country Park (GM-0156). When I tried to upload it again for Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park (GM-0125) it gave me a duplicate log error. I found that the solution is after uploading with the first reference to use the QSO manager in Log4OM to add an ADIF column of MY_SIG_INFO with the second reference before exporting it again. This time the upload works with the new reference.
I discovered that some of my earliest SOTA activations are not in Log4OM. For these I exported the log from the SOTA database. This is in CSV format so I used ON6ZQ’s online SOTA to ADIF log converter. I could then upload the ADIF to POTA and import it into Log4OM.
I now have a few POTA awards. Whether I will go and do a POTA activation that isn’t also a SOTA activation I’m not sure but I shall continue to upload to POTA. After an activation I use FLE to create an ADIF file to import into Log4OM and upload to the SOTA database. Presumably I should be able to upload that directly to POTA too.
Hi Richard,
Very good. I’m part way through the same project as you, importing ADIF files into the POTA site. A long way to go yet as I haven’t done the larger multiple summit big area parks yet, such as the Yorkshire Dales, Lake District and the Galloway Biospere. Also Wales. I’m picking up leading activator scores like you as I’ve been doing SOTA for some considerable time. I had an issue establishing the eligible areas on Ingleborough (Yorkshire Dales NP) which in POTA parlance is known as a “TWO-FER”. With some detailed help via email from Simon @G7WKX on how to use the overlay data in the DEFRA Magic mapping page, I was able to confirm that G-0071 (the SAC Conservation area ref.) includes the top of Ingleborough. I’m gathering all my activations from each national park or AONB and merging them into a single file for each POTA before importing them into the database. It quite a time consiming task, with also researching that the exact location in relation to the park boundaries can be counted for certain. I’m importing a few park files every day until I have got them all in. I don’t think I have much to declare in Scotland apart from Galloway Biospere. You may have noticed there are no parks listed in the Isle of Man, which is surprising. One famous SOTA and POTA Hunter to benefit from my imports is Don @G0RQL - he’s picking up loads of points from my imports!
73 Phil
I had the same issue and used the same solution. You have to change MY_SIG_INFO to reflect the second “park”. I used ADIF Master to make the change but there are other options as you have shown.
