I was curious if there has ever been any discussion about ways that POTA and SOTA could collaborate with one another?
I thoroughly enjoy both programs. I often chase SOTA activators when activating my local parks and I enjoy hunting POTA activators when activating a summit.
My personal favorite is when a SOTA summit falls within a POTA park and I can work both programs.
I love making Park 2 Park contacts and I love making Summit 2 Summit contacts. This got me thinking, would there ever be a way to have some cross pollination between the programs like a Summit to Park contact?
Some kind of badge, points, or award for Summit to Park QSOs could be fun.
That said, I’m sure there are plenty of logistics and other reasons why this isn’t feasible. I just figured it never hurts to ask those with greater insight. At the end of the day being able to make more contacts is never a bad thing, right?
Again this is purely a curiosity and I’m perfectly fine with how both programs exist.
As far as activating goes there is a fundamental difference in the rules - with SOTA your station can’t have anything to do with a car but with POTA it is fine to sit in and power your rig from the car.
Aren’t most SOTA summits in parks? Maybe that isn’t the case elsewhere but here in the north of England most G/NP, G/LD and G/SP summits are in one of the national parks or national scenic areas or national nature reserves or similar POTA area. I upload my logs to POTA although I don’t have much interest in the POTA programme.
I’m not sure how summit to park logging would work in practice. SOTA and POTA have two completely different databases. I doubt if the SOTA MT would want the effort of somehow combining them.
When I’m in a PARK while doing SOTA, I call it SPOTA, spotting in both, uploading to both. Not sure what the percentage of summits are capable of this in the US but I’m guessing it may be lower than some other countries.
Not many Summits in VK5 are in parks and the car park is usually at the perimeter of parks where as the SOTA summit is some distance from the car park with several KM to hike. If you want to log both activities just do as per normal, register with both SOTA and POTA sites. If you want another Activating challenge join the WWFF activity and try to get 44 QSO per activation.
I have a work colleague who is keen on POTA, whereas I do SOTA, but we have a common interest in radio. (and also experimentation of various bands and modes).
It did lead to a grand QSO last Friday between SOTA summit Black Mount, GM/SS-158 and POTA park IS-0049 while he was visiting Iceland.
Room for both schemes I feel and both involve the challenge of amatuer radio outdoors.
On the subject of powering your radio from the vehicle battery, I once had to power the alarm keyfob for my bike from the radio battery to start the bike after an activation.
There’s been some (very) brief discussion a few years back but we were at different stages of development of infrastructure and what I had in mind wasn’t feasible at that stage.
I should probably revisit but I can’t imagine we can reconcile the rule differences sufficiently to allow badging or some sort of award. There’s one or two technical aspects I have in mind however.
He has started a new “Pack Mule” award for parks. It is a new award specifically to get POTA ops out of their cars. The award is for 100 activations solely by hiking. An activation is 22 contacts.
The Pack Mule award is from the “POTA News and Reviews” web site, not from the official POTA program.
Perry is not in the SOTA program but many of his POTA activations are from summits and he always walks to where he activates.
I’m delighted to see the SOTA and POTA topics being discussed so amicably here.
Back in 2021, when I first wanted to write about POTA as a competitor (or imitators ) in Reflector, I was almost too afraid.
I have a question. In the park, I like to chase the summits. Is it fair for me, as a telegrapher, to use /p like with an S2S? After all, I’m portable then.
I live in Colorado (W0C) and have a personal goal of Working All States (WAS) SOTA to POTA. I’m currently at 42, and still need ME, VT, MA, RI, CT, DE, AK, and HI. When complete, my spider diagram will show 50 different SOTA peaks in Colorado, each with a line to a POTA park in each of 50 states. This was my alternative to Working All States Summit-to-Summit when I realized many states don’t have a SOTA peak, and I thought “Working Many States” just didn’t get it.
Maybe I’ll work you in the future for another state that I need…
Portable just means portable, it tells you nothing about what and why you are portable, it isn’t owned by any of the OTA awards, to me it just implies that you are away from the shack and not using mains power - and to me personally it makes calling you a little more attractive. So yes, I guess it is fair.
Absolutely. /P is for anyone who operates portable, whether on a summit, in a park or anywhere else.
I do prioritise /P and /M calls for obvious reasons.
I have received S2S calls from people on a GMA summit and I happily exchange summit details.
Haha.
) in Reflector, I was almost too afraid.