If you haven’t seen it yet, take a few minutes to watch Kevin W1DED‘s YouTube update on the state of POTA. Kevin is on the Board of Directors of the Parks On the Air organization and so is speaking for the program. There are two parts to the post, first a rundown of POTA stats and growth, and then a discussion of new work that is being started to implement improvements in the program, the website, and the infrastructure.
The numbers are big, and I can’t lie, they surprised me. In terms of raw QSOs, POTA saw:
| Year | Logs Submitted | Total QSOs |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 245,000 | 10.6 million |
| 2024 | 333,000 | 13.0 million |
| 2025 | 406,000 | 15.2 million |
That’s an average growth rate of about 40% over the period, and that’s how Kevin presented it.
Let’s look at the rates year-to-year instead of averages. This is of course a tiny dataset, and so anything we calculate with these values should have some pretty wide bars around it. That said, in terms of QSOs th growth rate was 22.6% from 2023 to 2024, and then 16.9% from 2024 to 2025. That’s a 25% drop in the year-to-year growth rate.
We can do the same thing with the number of submitted logs. It’s about a 36% increase from 2023 to 2024, and a 22% increase from 2024 to 2025.
Activity has grown substantially since 2023—roughly 40% overall. However, year-over-year growth has slowed from about 23% to 17%, and log submissions show an even sharper deceleration from 36% to 22%. The program is still expanding, but the rate of expansion is clearly slowing down. This looks to me like a program that is starting to mature, and I expect to see year-to-year growth continue to decline until it hits a more moderate, steady value.
Paul W7PFB has been cooking the numbers for 2026 and has data for January and February around CW vs SSB activation. We are actively discussing these numbers on the PN&R Forum — here’s a quote from Paul with some numbers for a single day in February:
Between Feb 22 and Feb 23, there were a total of 1477 activations, with activators activating 732 parks that were new to the activator (no idea of total number of parks), 63710 Qs, 9996 CW Qs, 11979 data Qs, 41735 phone Qs.
There were 186 activators who included at least one CW QSO.
Those activators did 412 activations and 10175 CW QSOs, along with 2866 data Qs and 6656 phone Qs.
I should point out that Paul’s forum post also breaks out CW vs DATA vs PHONE numbers for the first two months of 2026.
The second part of Kevin’s message focused on work being done behind the scenes. It looks like a fairly large rewrite of the current platform with an eye to improving performance, especially around log ingestion — who among us hasn’t submitted a log during the dreaded Period of Log Batch Jobs from 03Z to 11Z and have had to submit a support ticket to get it unstuck? Mapping representatives are slated to have simpler, more local control over their areas, and it sounds like some new awards are in the works, too. Kevin mentioned live stats on the POTA web page, which I think would be cool.
This is exactly the right time to undertake this work. The technical platform is starting to feel brittle, with warnings against posting logs during ‘batch times’ and changes in status sometimes taking days to appear. Just earned Worked All States? It’ll show up in a day or so, maybe. Just posted a log? It takes the sam amount of time for your numbers to be updated.
This sort of thing should be instant. There should be no batch processes, no queueing, none of that nonsense. I only bring up my experience because it is pertinent: I recently retired from the computer science faculty at a major New England university. I was in the systems group and I specifically taught performance and systems design. I’m looking at a recent day’s uploads, it was around 65,000 QSOs. This is a small number. I don’t know who is running the development effort, but I sincerely hope that they understand this.
I think that Kevin’s message is a good one, and we really needed to hear it. One of the beefs about POTA that I hear a fair amount is the lack of transparency and communication in what is essentially a small volunteer organization, which to be honest is what happens to almost every project in this stage of maturity. I hope that the board continues to be open about how the project is going and that they increase their presence in the POTA community. If anyone in the organization would like to post regularly here, I’d be happy to give you the platform as a permanent column.
Here’s Kevin’s YouTube post, have a look:
2 Responses
Another must-see is Frank K4FMH’s analysis of the numbers at AmateurRadio.com: https://www.amateurradio.com/a-snapshot-of-u-s-pota-sites-activators-and-activations
What caught my eye is his depiction of park activity — half of the Qs are coming from the top 10% of parks.
You’re the man with the per park statistics. I’m fairly certain his statistics are badly skewed by N-fers, and in particular by parks like the Lewis and Clark NHT, Ice Age Floods, and so on. Those parks span huge areas and many states, and are commonly activated not as solo parks but as N-fers to get multipliers for other parks. But I don’t have the numbers at hand, nor am I inclined to write code to gather the data.
But sure, let’s suppose that there’s some Pareto distribution of activations of parks, and half the activations really do come from just 10% of parks. This is an issue because? Parks on the eastern half of the US where distances are shorter and the ham population for both activators and hunters is higher will naturally see more activations than, say, Nile Springs SWA in the middle of rural WA. Beyond that, some parks have been POTA entities since the inception in 2017, and some have only been added in the past month. Expecting them to have similar numbers of activations is patently ludicrous. I read K4FMH’s article and came away thinking “And so? What’s the point of these complaints?” I am shocked, SHOCKED to learn that perhaps the volume of postings on social media about POTA might not be in proportion to the number of participants.