Part of our Getting On The Air: Modes, Operations, and Making Contacts guide.
Two of the most popular activities in ham radio right now are POTA and SOTA. Both get you out of the shack and operating from interesting places, both are beginner friendly, and both have huge, welcoming communities. If you have heard people talk about activations and hunters and were not sure what they meant, this is the post for you.
What POTA is
POTA stands for Parks on the Air. The idea is simple: you take a radio to a qualifying park (national parks, state parks, forests, wildlife areas, and many more) and make contacts from there. When you operate from a park, you are an activator. The people who contact you from home or elsewhere are hunters. Activators try to make enough contacts to successfully activate the park, and hunters try to work as many parks as they can.
POTA is popular because the barrier to entry is low. Thousands of parks qualify, many are a short drive away, and you do not need mountaintop fitness or special gear. A modest radio, a battery, and a wire antenna will get you activating.
What SOTA is
SOTA stands for Summits on the Air. It is the same basic activator and hunter concept, but instead of parks you operate from qualifying mountain summits. Each summit is worth a number of points based on its elevation, and there is a scoring and awards structure that rewards activators and chasers (SOTA uses the term chaser rather than hunter) over time.
SOTA adds a hiking and outdoor element that POTA does not require. You have to physically get yourself and your gear to the summit, and there are rules about operating under your own power away from your vehicle. That makes SOTA especially appealing if you like combining radio with hiking, backpacking, or peak-bagging. It also pushes you toward lightweight, low-power gear.
How to do an activation
The general flow is similar for both programs:
- Pick your park or summit and look up its reference number in the program’s database.
- Post a spot or a schedule (called an alert) so hunters know when and where to find you, and on what frequency.
- Set up your station, get on the air, and start calling CQ (for example, “CQ POTA” or “CQ SOTA”).
- Log every contact with the other station’s call sign, the time, the band, and the mode.
- After you get home, upload your log to the program’s website to get credit.
To count as a successful activation, POTA generally requires at least 10 contacts from the park. SOTA requires a minimum of 4 contacts to earn the summit points. Both let you activate on your own schedule, and both reward you for coming back and doing it again.
Important apps and websites
These are the tools that make the whole thing work:
- pota.app is the main hub for Parks on the Air. You use it to find parks, view the live spots page, post your own spots, and submit your logs.
- sotawatch.sota.org.uk and the SOTA Database (sotadata.org.uk) are the equivalents for Summits on the Air. SOTAwatch shows live spots and alerts, and the database handles summit lookups and log submission.
- SOTA Goat and SOTL.as are popular for finding summits and viewing them on a map.
- Ham2K Portable Logger (PoLo) and similar logging apps make it easy to log and spot right from your phone in the field.
- APRS2SOTA and RBNHole are automatic spotting helpers. If you call CQ in CW, the Reverse Beacon Network can even spot you automatically.
Which should you try first?
If you want the easiest on-ramp, start with POTA. There are more parks, they are usually close by, and you can drive right up to many of them. If you love the outdoors and want a challenge that combines radio with hiking, SOTA is hard to beat. Plenty of people do both, and there are even parks that overlap with summits so you can score a two-fer.
Either way, the community is the real draw. Get on the air, call CQ, and you will quickly discover how many people are out there waiting to work you.