POTA - Parks on the Air

Introduction

Parks on the Air is a program which encourages portable operations in Amateur Radio.

POTA operators head out of their shacks and setup their radio at once of thousands of locations throughout Western Australia to “activate” the park. Parks can be full on national parks all the way down to small naturl reserves or even beachs.

Benefits for EC6Net operators

POTA is a great practice tool for when our talents may be needed in an crisis. POTA gives us an incentive to get out and operating portable.

• Preparation and Planning
• Operating in challenging environments
• Adapting to adverse conditions
• QRP operations

Getting Started

Head over to the POTA Website and create yourself an account.

Once you have an account you can plan you first activation but checking out the map of parks near you.

Logging

POTA logging is one way, meaning only the activator needs to submit a log. (There a bit of trust there)

You can log in any way you feel comfortable but I always suggest doing so in a way that makes your life easy. Any logger will suffice, as long as you can export your logs to and .adi file for uploading to the POTA website. I prefer POLO. (Portable Logger by Ham2k) It has some great integrations for use when activating. Best of all it has an offline list of all the POTA locations and will show you the closest. It also does WWFF as well.