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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there is some implied knowledge I am missing. This describes what this is:

> Welcome to the Parks on the Air(POTA) site for international portable amateur radio operations that promote emergency awareness and communications from national/federal and state/provincial level parks.

The first part, alright, but the second part? Why are we promoting using a ham radio within a national/state level park? Why is there "awards" (certificates mostly) for doing this? Why is this work important?

For those in the "in-group" I'm sure this all makes complete sense. For me, I don't get it.

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Not a ham (not against it, maybe one day), but my take is it's a sport-ification that's trying to appeal to the younger crowd. From the outside, at least to me ham sometimes seems like a bunch of old guys sitting out in their shack. And those old guys are dying out. Which is a problem if you believe cultural EM proficiency is important to a technology-oriented economy and communications-driven global military power projection...

So "emergency comms from parks" appeals to preppers and outdoorsy folks (who skew younger), and maybe gives a reason for the young nerds to go outside. It ain't darts or cornhole or spikeball, but it's on that spectrum of sport if you look at it the right way.

(None of this is meant to be anything against ham radio... there's been some great stories out of NC where it was the hams who kept comms running after Helene knocked out power and cell towers. And honestly, there's a certain ultimate-freedom beauty to a communication medium where you don't need to pay anyone a subscription, you're not using someone else's wires, and the only firewall is what the sun is doing to the ionosphere today. Just hard to compete for attention in the dopamine tsunami world of xbox and youtube and arduinos.)

Yup, I'm not a big one for ragchewing (holding long, full conversations over radio) but I really enjoy the combination of tech and outdoors. The idea of scoring points for climbing hard mountains and getting tech up and running out there is a fun, objective-based way for me to do the wildly-cool-when-I-think-about-it activity of talking with people hundreds of miles through the air away without repeaters or general infrastructure.

> And those old guys are dying out.

No disagreement with the rest but that point is a bit of a shepard tone... you can find people making the "it's a bunch of old guys who are dying out" comment in amateur radio publications 50 years ago, confirmed by netcraft no doubt.

There are more license holders than ever-- a decrease vs the total population, yes, but as a licensee the total number matters more than the share of the population.

(If anything, the utility of the skill is increased by decreasing percentage of the population but improved by increasing total numbers: E.g. in an emergency there will be plenty of people to contact, but also more people who benefit from your assistance)

It's true that tech like the internet has diminished some interest in radio, but OTOH computing technology and the overall decrease in real cost of sophisticated electronics has significantly supercharged radio.

Hams tend to be older because of free time, disposable income, ownership of property where you can put up an antenna, and other such considerations... and because its one of relative few socially-interactive hobbies that you can still participate in even from a hospital bed.

I wonder if online video games will eventually share a similar fate? Once your typical 80 year old is someone who grew up playing online games will online games be significantly overrun by old farts? :P

If you are looking to make contacts it also gives other amateurs a reason to make a contact with you vs. someone else; there are plenty of hunters who want to hunt every park they can. It also offers a predefined "out" to get out of ragchewing if that's not your thing. :)

Contesting or radiosport has been around for a long time in amateur radio. There are lots of contests throughout the year. Contests essentially involve making contacts with other amateurs. There is usually some sort of exchange that validates that a contact has been made. Different contests have different scoring. Amateur radio has a lot of aspects to it and some people love the contesting aspect. Some aren't into it at all.

Summits-on-the-Air, Parks-on-the-Air, and others involve going out and operating a portable station (the activator). The reason why parks are a good place to operate is that they have open spaces, trees, etc that are good for deploying antennas. You also don't generally need permission like you would with a school field for instance. Operating portable is great for people that live in an apartment or condo where they can't put up an antenna.

The emergency aspect is having the gear and practice for operating portable like one might have to do in an emergency.

In the end, it is about fun and using your equipment and skills in different ways.

I don't think there's anything to get - it's just for fun. It started as an AARL one-off for the 110th anniversary of the establishment of national parks in the US, and proved popular, and turned into its own thing.

I think if you look at things like Niantic it's a similar two-for-one appeal: a motivating excuse to go someplace you would like to go but might not have otherwise gone and engaging in activity you like.

> I don't think there's anything to get - it's just for fun. It started as an AARL one-off for the 110th anniversary of the establishment of national parks in the US, and proved popular, and turned into its own thing.

> I think if you look at things like Niantic it's a similar two-for-one appeal: a motivating excuse to go someplace you would like to go but might not have otherwise gone and engaging in activity you like.

I believe the GP is saying that it doesn't say what "it" is. AARL and Niantic aren't exactly household names outside of people already interested in radio.

If they're trying to attract new people to amateur radio with this as floatrock surmised, (and maybe they're not! and if not, maybe they should be?), you need to assume this is going to be people's first point of contact... and this website isn't particularly useful for that use case.

It really should say what it is about. Go the park, setup radio, and communicate with other amateur operators. It doesn't even mention activating parks which at least ham operators would understand.

I think there is assumption that visitor would know what Summits on the Air is since that is better known.

I think one of the big problems with the ham scene is, ironically, communication. If you search the internet for information about using ham radio, the loudest voices are sour, cantankerous forum dwellers for whom unwanted clandestine vigilante radio regulation enforcement and compliance are the most interesting part of amateur radio. Good luck if you don't already know how taboo Baofeng, et al radios are before you write your first post. That's not appealing to most people. In fact, most find that sort of personality repulsive. Who wants to ask a question somewhere about a new interest if you're nearly guaranteed to elicit a condescending non-answer from someone more interested in making themselves feel smart than they are at being a good resource?

Communication isn't just putting the information out there, it's about sharing the good feelings people get from doing ham stuff. If there's a charismatic amateur radio youtuber or something that's way more about the joy of using radio rather than the nitpicky details even experienced hams find tiring, I haven't encountered them. They probably need to do some serious promotion. Lot's of old farts like to think young people just aren't technical enough or don't have the discipline: it's bullshit. Compare how many technical workers there are today vs 40 years ago. I'll bet 90% of what repels new hopeful hams from getting involved boils down to the curse of expertise, gatekeeping, and angry hall-monitorism among the most vocal people that haunt places that new folks might go for information. It's not just amateur radio that does this, but it might be the biggest offender I've seen at least since the Perl newsgroups in the late 90s.

I would be into ragchewing except (at least on 20/40/80 where I have a consistent setup) the vast majority of SSB contacts are with ancient men and most conversations I catch contain unambiguously racist statements or at least a lot of "kids these days" talk. I don't care that they're having those conversations, I just have no interest in talking to them.

For sure. It definitely lends a chicken/egg component to it. That problem can't get better without more people involved but more people aren't likely to get involved because of that problem.

Thanks! I looked at their website for a while and read most of the other comments in this thread- and still had no idea what this was about. I would expect them to have something like your second sentence on the top of their page.

> Niantic

The slightly funny thing here for me is that Niantic has nothing to do with radio at all! They made Pokémon GO, the augmented reality "find Pokémon in the real world" app that was pretty popular a few years ago :D

Ha! I was like "Ok whatever that shit is"

I'll take a run at why a promoting amateur radio is important.

1. Hams develop highly technical skills while interacting socially.

2. With entry low cost and no subscription fees, hams have global communication abilities without cellular, internet, and power grids.

3. Hams support community, often with important emergency comms roles during disasters, war, or search and rescue efforts.

Why parks? They're easily accessed. They're free. They're visible to newcomers who wouldn't otherwise know amateur radio could be fun and social.

on 1. it's not really realistic to learn effective radio skills during an emergency that necessitates the use of radio.

(There is actually a lot more to operating in a Situation beyond just being able to turn the radio on and tune it, but even just getting a radio on the right channel is a challenge for a lot of people without some practice).

Agreed. That's why promoting ham skills and events it is important: Learn it before you need it! Cheers.

I think using national parks just gives a convenient "marker" by which to designate valid activation zones, and ensures public access, thus making the program available to anyone. Same deal with Summits on the Air, the whole idea is creating a fun "game-ified" program around getting on the radio in the great outdoors. Because contesting and "achievements" are such a big thing for many amateur radio operators (or at least it's one big facet of the culture), this is just another tangent by which one could partake in the hobby. I mean, honestly the simplest explanation is "because it's fun". It's cool to go out to a park and contact people all over the world and also have a comprehensive system around it, where people want to "chase" you because theyll get points for it, and it all goes into a public log/database, and certain milestones are recognized by little auto-generated certificates/awards. Again, it's just fun. Maybe not for everyone, but it's a hobby -- there's no big stake in the game here. As for why it's "important" - it's not especially, except maybe for motivating people to stay familiar with their gear, and radio communication procedures. I don't think anyone portrays POTA/SOTA as particularly "important", though they are pretty fun and awesome.

Have you ever played a video game with side-quests? There are lots of side-quests in ham radio and POTA is one of them. Awards in ham radio are exactly the same as "achievements" in video games where you collect all the special items. They don't MEAN anything, you can't sell them, they are there for the fun of chasing them, and--tangentially--bragging rights.

There's no "work," it's just another part of the ham radio hobby.

There are a ton of replies in here, including yours which seem to be trying to explain what this is, but appear to be assuming too much, and still skipping the actual explanation.

Drive out to a park. Set up a radio. Announce you are in a park. You are known as 'activating' the park. People in other places answer, they are known as 'chasers'.

Why? People like making radio contacts with people in novel places. People like setting up their radio in cool places.

There is some gameification, and points gained for activating and chasing. The points get you nothing, not everyone even records them.

Does that work?

Thanks. That was really hard to guess from the website, but I supposed the intended audience already knows what this is.

It came out of an ARRL field day event called NPOTA ("National Parks on the Air"). People loved that event and so the POTA organization was created to continue it, extending the valid parks to state-managed parks (in the US, other countries have their own park inclusion criteria).

Ham radio is a hobby and, like all hobbies, different people get different things out of it.

Some people enjoy restoring and operating antique equipment. Some people enjoy designing and building homebrew gear. Some people enjoy the challenge of working esoteric propagation modes, like bouncing signals off thunderstorms or aurorae or the moon, or relaying through the ISS or a handful of dedicated artificial satellites.

Some people emphasize the rock-bottom reliability of the technology. Two people with appropriate gear and knowledge can communicate with each other, and do so completely independently of any third-party infrastructure. This was a total superpower up until about 30 years ago, and remains appealing when thinking about emergency scenarios.

Some people are naturally competitive and will make a game of anything possible. These people have invented awards -- along with various pseudo-regulatory bodies to allocate same -- for things like making a radio contact on each of the seven continents, or for contacting the most people within a designated 48h period, or many other feats defined by various -- largely arbitrary -- rules.

POTA is one such set of rules. The "national/state level park" aspect is just to put some constraints on the competition. As others have pointed out, this is basically the same as niantic forcing you to get off your couch and walk down the block to the churchtower before you can catch a pokemon.

This requirement bleeds a little into the previous point, since it necessitates a portable rig (either human-carried or mounted to a vehicle of some sort). Such a rig would be more useful in a hypothetical emergency comms scenario than one that requires mains electricity, a power amp the size of a filing cabinet, and a 30m antenna bolted to the side of your house that just burned down.

But yeah, in the end it's basically Pokemon Go that requires custom hardware and uses national/state parks in lieu of defining their own map of pokespots.

A point I felt worth mentioning is that many of the contest things are pretty hard core. Serious effort, serious equipment, fairly intense. (to give a kind of extreme example: https://youtu.be/2Rh3-K8V4_o?t=266 )

POTA is very laid back. Only the party in the park even needs to log.

> But yeah, in the end it's basically Pokemon Go that requires custom hardware and uses national/state parks in lieu of defining their own map of pokespots.

parks are also at least little interesting, I've learned about a lot of parks that I never would have known about just due to looking them up when I see stations operating out of them.

Also POTA (and other such contact collecting activities) provide an opportunity to practice your radio skills and use your equipment without the risk of getting involved in conversations you're not interested in or don't have time for. It's not rude to not get into a conversation, 'cause you're trying to rack up contacts and there are people waiting!

One of the top reasons against amateur radio I hear from non-hams is that they don't have anything to talk to other hams about. Turns out there is plenty to do without having a conversation on the radio.

(Of course, for people who want to converse there are plenty of opportunities to do that-- opportunities that are enhanced by contact collecting activities that do a lot to explore what locations are reachable.)

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