The POTA Bailey-Sprott Challenge

 

What is it?

 

In 2021, two POTA hunters were able to hunt a park every single day of the year. These two hunters were Kenneth Bailey, N5HA and Julien Sprott, K9AV. I missed this in 2021 by a few days, some self-inflicted (traveling without a radio), and others were caused by park activators either not copying my call correctly, not logging my call correctly, or by not uploading the log to the POTA system. I have parks logged for those days in my own log. Vance Martin, N3VEM was digging in the POTA database, and found these two guys and their accomplishment. He then coined the term of “Baily-Sprott Challenge”, and started to report about the progress of POTA activators and hunters in his monthly POTA update videos (since then, he has passed the responsibility for these update videos on to Mark Heere, N3NWV). Here is one of these POTA update videos, the information about the challenge is towards the end of the short video: https:// youtu.be/r1JahJMcVS4

 

2022

 

For 2022, I planned to work on the challenge again, but this time, I needed a way to work my station remotely. For digital modes, that’s not too complicated, as long as you can “remote” into the computer, one can make FT8 contacts with a minimum amount of clicking. But, that was not what I had in mind. In addition to trying to work (at least) one POTA park a day, I was also renewing my pledge of having at least one CW contact per day. Ideally, that would be a POTA contact to keep things simple. That requires a bit more planning. I did start the year with something that worked, and refined the system throughout the year. It’s what I am calling remote operations McGuiver style with duct tape, baling wire and a Swiss Army knife. I will describe this solution at a later time.

One would think that getting a park a day is not too hard. If you are home and near the shack, and the weather is great and you don’t have to pick up your antenna off the ground and put it back into the trees, and a lot of other things just fall into place, then of course, it’s not hard. But with a job, traveling, sometimes really bad propagation, and at other times nobody in parks when I had time to hunt, it all of a sudden gets a lot more complicated.

This year, it was not just the hunters who were trying to get a park a day, there were also a number of activators who tried to do the same by activating (at least) a park per day. At the end of the year, there were six of them still standing with at least one park activation per day of the year: James KE8PZN, Bill K4NYM, Del N2NWK, Kerri KB2WAV, Eric KD4MZM and Bob WC1N. Congratulations to all of them for this achievement.

To prevent what had happened last year, my goal was to get backup contacts – enough to make sure that I would get at least one official park contact logged in the POTA database. I’ve been doing this for a while, so I had a good idea of who the reliable loggers were, and as long as I had one of them in my log, I did not panic too much. Sometime during the year, the POTA program allowed activators to upload their own logs. This changed everything for me: All of a sudden, logs started to come in shortly after the activation was over, and I did not have to wait until the logs were submitted to the regional uploader, and that person then uploaded the logs into the database. I could stop worrying once I saw the first log show up in my POTA hunter log.

 

Busting Pileups

 

Some of the more prolific activators attract big pileups. My home station is running up to 50W output power, so no match for the legal limit crowd, but I got good at cracking the code for the different activators about how to get their attention – without being too obnoxious to my fellow hunters. For this to work, it’s good to have some “name recognition”. Those activators who knew my call would be much more likely to pull it out of the cacophony of calls than somebody who never heard it before. This is true for both phone and CW.

 

Working from Hotel Rooms and Other Remote Locations

 

We did quite a bit of traveling throughout the year, and the problem of course was how to work a park, especially one on CW from a hotel room. My remote station setup allowed me to send and receive audio, but had no mechanism for true remote CW. I managed to get my contacts by creating a few macros for the standard exchange (e.g. “K5KHK”, “TU UR”, “559”, “599” and “dit dit”). As long as I had a fairly stable Internet connection, I was able to make my contacts.

 

So, how did I do?

 

Days With Contacts

 

Mode	Days
CW	365
Phone	359
Data	335
All Modes	329

I had one confirmed CW contact into a park every single day of the year, phone contacts on 350 days and data contacts on 335 days out of the year. I managed to get a contact in all three modes on 329 days.

Who Did I Work the Most?

Here are the ten operators I work the most. Some of these contacts may be 2-fer POTA entities (or even 3 or 4-fers), where one contact counts for multiple parks. I hunted Del, N2NWK a number of times in Washington, DC when he was at a 4-fer. I do have Susan W2SBA in this list. All the contacts were Park 2 Park contacts when we were activating together.

Call	Count
K4NYM	308
N2NWK	268
W2SBA	237
KE8PZN	182
KD4MZM	132
KD2UBJ	113
W2SUZ	87
N2MAK	80
KB3WAV	76
WB2SMK	59

Done!

This was hard work, and everybody involved in this committed the time and effort not because there was a big prize at the finish line. There is not even an award category for this achievement in POTA (at least of this writing), so we all did this just because we set a goal, and we stuck with it

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This article was initially published in the February 2023 issue of the Rochester Amateur Radio Association, Inc. newsletter