My Parks On the Air Stats After a Year and a Half

I’ve been involved with Parks on the Air (or POTA) for about a year and a half. My first POTA QSO was on 7/28/2018.

Since then, I’ve had 1000 hunter QSOs (that is QSOs I had with activators in a park) – at least based on what was reported to the POTA database. With that many QSOs, I have a nice sample to do some analysis. I downloaded my hunted QSOs recently (meaning, I copied and pasted from the web site into Excel), and after a little bit of scripting and pivoting I can report the following: As of 1/27/2020, I had 1000 hunter QSOs with 234 different activators. More than 50% of these QSOs were with just 20 different activators. Here are the top ten activators I’ve worked, who account for almost 40% of all QSOs:

Thanks to Tom KU8T and Kerri WB3WAV, I have a few Operator to Operator awards, there are a few more contacts I need with Bob N4CD for the next award.

Another interesting tidbit is that there are 102 contacts with one-time activators, or more accurately, activators I only worked once. That does not necessarily mean that they only activated once. Fifteen of those were within the last few weeks, so chances are they are new to POTA and there will be many more contacts with them in the future. I could probably cross reference that with the Activator leader board to find out how often they actually activated a park. I’ll wait with that for when I get close to the 2000 QSO mark 🙂

Here is a breakdown of modes and bands used while chasing:

Hunting parks is only half the fun, so I started activating
almost immediately. When I look at the QSOs I’ve had while activating parks, I count 1013 at this time. That means that for about every hunter QSO I’ve had, I also had one activator QSO.

I worked 460 different call signs while activating, and here are the top 11:

And again, broken down by band and mode we get this:

Both as a hunter and an activator, I use the 40m band the most.

Thanks to everybody out there either activating or working me when I am out in a park. This would not be possible without others being there either putting out calls or answering them. Thank you!