Why POTAmap?

I’m a retired professor of computer science, and I still teach a few courses here and there. I like to keep my skills sharp. Just as I retired, I fell into the world of POTA, which absolutely driven by data. I like data a lot, especially coming up with ways to associate and represent data, and when I’d done a few activations and realized that I wanted a way to visualize my activity, well, what was a boy to do? I sat down and started coding.

I was obsessed in those early POTA days with both building up to 100 unique references and visiting parks that had very little activity. I wanted a way to see where I’d worked, where I hadn’t, and which of the ones I hadn’t fell into the ‘underrepresented’ category.

Accessing POTAmap

The map is available from the POTAmap pick on the PN&R menu bar, or you may access it directly at the URL https://pota.review/potamap. You don’t need to be logged in to PN&R to use the map.

The map will ask you to allow it to use location services, and if the map hasn’t seen you before it will also ask you for your callsign. You don’t need to provide a callsign unless you want your personal activations displayed on the map. An example of that is the image at the top of this post, displaying POTAmap as live wallpaper. In this view I’m really just interested in current activations as a sort of status board, and so I didn’t bother to give it my callsign. You’ll notice that the map center defaults to the center of the USA in this state.

In the upper left you’ll see + and – buttons to scale the map, and you can also gesture (pinch in / out) if you are on a touch screen. Click and hold to drag the map around. The map remembers its last state.

Uploading Your Activations

One of the first things you’ll want to do is to upload a file containing your current activations. Unfortunately there isn’t yet a way to do this in any other way — I maintain hope that the POTA devs will take pity on use and provide access to the data at some point in the future.

On the plus side, there is a way to get your 25 most recent activations, and so once you’ve seeded the map with your history it will automatically update itself each time you access the map. I should note that if you don’t have more than 25 activations to begin with, you can skip the load described below, as those will be automatically picked up.

Here’s how to load your data:

Log in to your account at https://pota.app. Once logged in, choose My Stats from the Account dropdown at the top right:

On your Stats page you’ll see an Export CSV button. Click it to download your history to your computer.

Now, open the POTAmap back up and select the top button, ‘Upload My Activations‘. Choose your downloaded file, and you are all set. Again, this is something you should only need to do once.

Spot Colors / Show All Spots

This first image is the default view, and it shows more or less everything. The map here is scaled to a section west of my QTH. Here’s the color code:

In some areas of the country there aren’t many ATNO (All-Time New One) parks left, so keep an eye out for any new ones that might pop up. Check any pulsing purple spots you see on the map to check if someone’s been there yet or not.

Getting Information About References

There are two ways to see information about a spot. Hovering will give you a quick summary, and clicking provides additional details:

Clicking a spot will open the park’s data panel with information about the park, activation data, a link for driving directions using Google Maps, and a link to the PN&R review if it currently is published.

You can click the top link to open up the official POTA page for the park, and the Get Directions link will open up Google Maps to provide navigation to the park from your current location.

If a park is being currently activated, information about the active spot is provided by hovering, and a click will get you a bit of extra data along with the other links just mentioned. Note that for parks that are currently being activated, you can use the Park Query Language (PQL) query ?CALL: to quickly jump to a park that you know someone is at, for example to center the map on W1GRD’s activation, the PQL query is: ?CALL:W1GRD. PQL is described in more detail later in this document.

Recent activation information is under the (you guessed it) Recent Activations tab — it displays the three most recent activations.

Menu Controls

Searching

The search panel in POTAmap provides several ways to find and save information about parks.

A basic search can be done from the Search box using the name or number of a park. For example, if you are looking for US-12345, just type us-12345 or just 12345 into the box and hit Enter. The map will fly to center the park at your current zoom level.

If the park you are looking for is in the current map window, it will be highlighted in yellow. The search is progressive, so a search for us-1234 will highlight parks that start with US-1, then US-12, then US-123, and so on as you  type.

 

You can also type text to search for, and that text will match against parks that are in the current view. Here, for example, is a look in my area at parks that have the word ‘Forest’ in their title. They are highlighted in yellow. 

 

Center On My Location centers the map on your current location, at your current zoom level

Saved Searches

Any search operation, including PQL searches, can be saved and replayed. In the example above, three searches have been saved. To save the results of a search, just give it a name and click Save Current.

To replay any search, click the ‘play’ icon. Here’s my Virginia trip highlighted. The PQL query for this was: ?mine:1 sate:va.

Click the trashcan icon to delete a saved search.

When you load a saved search, its original query is inserted in to the Search box for you to edit if you wish to.

As an example of what can be done, here’s a saved search that looks for parks nearby that are in a ‘donut’ shape around me, that I haven’t activated. The PQL query here is ?mine:0 mindist:40 maxdist:100.

Sometimes I’ll do a full search, maybe for parks not more than 25 miles away that have no CW activations, but often I’ll run across a park mentioned on QRZ or Discord that sounds interesting, and I’ll just do a single search on it and then save the search. That way I’m building up a little library of interesting places to go.

Filters

Filters can be applied to the current map view that will help you zoom in on the data you are interested in. Open the Filters panel by clicking the Filters header.

Click an individual filter option to toggle it on or off, or click the All / Clr option to toggle everything on or off at once.

My

Click My to see only your own activations on the map. You can load your activations into the map from the Info panel.

Active

Current activations are highlighted with the Active filter, using color codes for mode.

New

A ‘new’ park is one that has been added to map in the past 30 days. It isn’t necessarily an ATNO with zero activations, it’s just that it is new. You can hover over a purple ‘new’ park to see if it has been activated yet. 

Spot Colors

The final option on the Filters panel allows you to turn individual modes on or off on the map. For example, if you only want to see current activations that are using CW or voice but not data, you can turn data off.

Here are two map views, one showing everything happening around Chicago, and then the same view but with FT8/FT4 activations not visible.

Info

The Info panel lets you set options and upload your activations. It also has a link to this reference page.

When you load the map for the first time, it will ask for your callsign, which is displayed in this section. POTAmap uses your callsign to automatically look up and load your most recent 25 activations from POTA.app.

To display your own activations on the map, first download your activations file from POTA.app (Export CSV from the My Stats upper-right menu on POTA.app), and then upload the file to POTAmap. Once that’s loaded you should see future activations appear automatically.

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