On a regular Saturday-morning Zoom meeting of hams a few months ago, a participant in Los Angeles asked the group, “Why can’t I activate one of my local parks and have it count in POTA?” Some of those in attendance echoed the sentiment. Based on that question, I asked myself what does POTA as a program look like? I recently published a snapshot of POTA sites, activations, and activators on this blog. There were several findings that we did not know before I published these results.

We often read that POTA is the “fastest-growing activity in U.S. amateur radio.” I’ve said it, too. Several times. I think satellite operations are a distant second growth activity. But do we actually know much about POTA activity growth through empirical data? My impressions are based on guesstimates from data on Canada where I analyzed a national survey of hams conducted originally by RAC. In 2001, some 37% of those Canadian hams said they engaged in portable operations, including POTA, SOTA and the like. It ranked 9th among 37 common ham activities in the survey. They reported to the tune of 15.7% participating in satellite operations. Alas, we do not have parallel data on U.S. hams so these are inferences made from comparative data. But data nonetheless.