Lately I’ve been fielding a lot of questions about the POTAmap available here at POTA News & Reviews, and I’ll also see the occasional search for map-related items in the logs. I take this as a sign that more folks are using the map now, and that the new activity is generating new questions. Without a doubt, there’s a distinct lack of documentation around how to use the thing — one of those projects that I keep meaning to get to and never quite do, as there seems to always be some new thing to code up in POTA Land that is infinitely more interesting.
So, as a bit of a stopgap, I’m writing this description of the tool here on PN&R, which I can link back to from the map itself relatively simply. We’ll start with why it exists.
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 Show All Spots, and it shows more or less everything. The map here is scaled to a section west of my QTH. Here’s the color code:
| Spot Color | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Orange | Your own activation |
| Deep blue / black | Zero activations (ATNO) |
| Green | Fewer than 10 activations |
| Red | Ten or more activations |
| Pulsing blue | Currently activating (updated each six minutes) |
| Pulsing purple | New park in past 30 days (click to see why) |
In some areas of the country there aren’t many ATNO (All-Time New One) parks left, in fact there’s just one in the All Spots view above, and I happen to know that it sits in the Connecticut River.
These color thresholds clearly reflect my personal bias toward seldom-activated parks, and an upcoming release will allow users to adjust those thresholds to their own liking.
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:
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.
Show My Activations
The hamburger menu top right is the primary way to manage the map. The second button down, ‘Show My Activations’ in the image below, is the next available state.
Clicking it will filter out all spots except your own activations, as shown below. I use this occasionally when I want to see what ‘shape’ my activations are taking. That pulsing blue spot is a place I’ve been…the ‘currently activating’ color takes precedence.
Hide My Activations
The next available state is Hide My Activations, which I use quite a bit. It filters out where you have been already and gives you a look at what’s around that you haven’t yet visited.
Show Current Activations
Finally, you can choose to just display current activations, marked by pulsing blue spots. As you’ve seen, you can hover over or click each spot for additional details about the park or the current activation, including the call and frequency the operator is using. This data is driven by the POTA spot page and is updated every six minutes.
Searching
The Search box allows you to search more or less any field of the database, so you can type the name or part of a name, the numeric ID, full POTA reference, or even just a nearby town to find a park. If the searched park is in the current field of view the map will auto-zoom to it, and if it isn’t in the current view, Go To Park will center the map on that location, just like Center On My Location will center the map on yours.
Version Information
The very bottom of the hamburger menu displays some information about which version of the app, the underlying database, and the ‘delta’ or change file you are using. A full data load is relatively large, and so once the map is initially loaded, a series of daily patch files is generated by the POTAmap server that tracks changes to the park list, and it’s the delta that gets pushed most often to your browser.
The map will periodically pull the entire dataset to keep everything up to date, but for the most part the only things you’ll see incoming is a delta file.
Future Work
Those are the basics. The POTAmap is under active development and new features are geared mainly toward allowing users to customize the display, and to proved a simpler way to choose which information you want to see. If you’d like to see a feature implemented, just drop me a note at perry@w1grd.com and I’ll add it to the tracker. Feel free to send questions and clarifications, too!
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2 Responses
EXCELLENT article Professor !!
LOL thanks, it was one of those tools I started building just for myself and then realized that other folks might use it, too, so there’s some of my own bias baked in, but I’ve been slowly pulling that out of the code.
One thing I quickly learned is that there is for some reason no official POTA API, which is a web endpoint to access to get data, and that makes things so much more difficult for devs like me trying to offer extra services like this.
The most controversial feature of the map, which I didn’t dwell on, is that you’ll see “inferred n-fers” listed. Periodically there’s some code that looks at recent activations across the top 100 operators and notices patterns of activations that match an n-fer, and they are stored and reported.