The organizers of Parks on the Air are quite adamant about POTA not being a contest. Still, though, there’s a ‘leaderboard’ for both activators and hunters. Being a numbers sort of guy, naturally this tempted me into looking at those leaderboards to see what insights might be gleaned from them.
Activations
Looking at the data sorted by number of activations offers up some interesting insights about how many activators there are, how many activations they do, and who does most of the activations.
As of the time I did this little analysis, there are 25,728 hams who have done activations and uploaded logs.
Of those 25,728 activators, 5232 have done exactly one activation, just a smidgen over 20%. Thus the mode of the number of activations (the most common number of activations) is 1; more hams have done exactly one activation than any other number. Interestingly, activators who have done only one activation represent just under 0.5% of all activations!
By way of contrast, the activator who has done the most activations has done 13,158; that’s slightly more than 1.1% of all activations and more than double the activations done by all the activators who have done only one activation, combined.
Here’s a table of the contributions of all activations ever, broken out by decile of callsigns ranked by number of activations:
| Decile | Activations Contributed | % of Total Activations | Cumulative % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top 10% | 837,357 | 71.643% | 71.643% |
| Next 10% (11–20%) | 168,568 | 14.422% | 86.065% |
| Next 10% (21–30%) | 73,796 | 6.314% | 92.379% |
| Next 10% (31–40%) | 37,693 | 3.225% | 95.604% |
| Next 10% (41–50%) | 21,005 | 1.797% | 97.401% |
| Next 10% (51–60%) | 12,512 | 1.071% | 98.472% |
| Next 10% (61–70%) | 7,662 | 0.656% | 99.127% |
| Next 10% (71–80%) | 5,058 | 0.433% | 99.560% |
| Next 10% (81–90%) | 2,572 | 0.220% | 99.780% |
| Bottom 10% (91–100%) | 2,572 | 0.220% | 100.000% |
The mean number of activations is 6; if you’ve done more than 6 activations this means you’re in the top half of all activators.
Activators who did 6 or fewer activations contributed under 3% of the activations.
Here are the threshold number of activations for each decile of callsigns ranked by number of activations.
| Percentile | Threshold |
|---|---|
| 10th percentile | 1 |
| 20th percentile | 1 |
| 30th percentile | 2 |
| 40th percentile | 4 |
| 50th (median) | 6 |
| 60th percentile | 11 |
| 70th percentile | 20 |
| 80th percentile | 41 |
| 90th percentile | 102 |
So, for example, if you’ve done 41 or more activations, you’re in the top 20% of all activators ranked by number of activations. If you’ve done 102 or more, you’re in the top 10%.
Bottom line: there are a lot of hams who have tried an activation and succeeded. There’s a much, much smaller cohort of hams who are doing the vast majority of all POTA activations; the top quarter of all activators contribute 90% of all activations. Half of all activations are done by just the top 6.35% of all activators.
Parks
Here’s a similar analysis, but this time with activators ranked by the number of unique parks they’ve activated.
Here’s a breakout of the threshold for each decile (and 95th, 99th percentile), as well as the
| Decile | Minimum Parks to Reach This Decile (≥) | Unique Parks Activated by This Decile | % of Total Unique Parks from This Decile |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st (top 10%) | 38 | 248,237 | 78.04% |
| 2nd | 17 | 29,086 | 9.15% |
| 3rd | 10 | 15,628 | 4.92% |
| 4th | 6 | 10,673 | 3.36% |
| 5th | 4 | 7,753 | 2.44% |
| 6th | 2 | 4,969 | 1.56% |
| 7th–10th (bottom 40%) | 1 | 6,645 | 2.09% |
The mode for number of parks is 1; roughly 7000 activators have activated exactly one park. As you can see, the median is 4 parks, so if you’ve activated 5 or more parks, you’re in the top half.
Again, you can see that the vast majority of parks are activated by the top 10% of activators. Some activators like to hit a lot of different parks. Some just hit the one park, either just one time, or perhaps over and over.
QSOs
Next we look at the activators ranked by number of QSOs:
| Decile | Minimum Total QSOs to Reach This Decile (≥) | % of All QSOs from This Decile |
|---|---|---|
| 1st (top 10%) | 3891 | 77.89% |
| 2nd | 1401 | 12.14% |
| 3rd | 635 | 4.88% |
| 4th | 325 | 2.35% |
| 5th | 178 | 1.25% |
| 6th | 100 | 0.69% |
| 7th | 57 | 0.39% |
| 8th | 32 | 0.22% |
| 9th | 16 | 0.12% |
| 10th (bottom 10%) | 1 | 0.06% |
This one caught me by surprise. Nearly 80% of all POTA QSOs are with just the top 10% of activators, and the top 50% of activators account for more than 98% of all QSOs. There are a lot of activators with low QSO counts, and there are more than 600 with exactly 10 QSOs – the minimum needed for a valid activation.
Bottom line
Depending on how you measure, something between 70% and 80% of all activation activity is being done by about 2500 very industrious activators.
4 Responses
Very interesting evaluation, Paul.
While I don’t think there are many who treat POTA as a contest, I think there are many (including myself), who look at it as one would DXCC or WAS. I like to set personal goals and see how I’m doing reaching them.
Steve KJ7BES
I’d agree, Steve – not so much contest as much as people are interested to see where they fall on the spectrum of activators and hunters. And, I would guess, a fair number of friendly rivalries.
For me the interesting part was seeing evidence that some people think “Oh, I’ll go try an activation and see if I enjoy it”, and find that that one activation has satisfied their interest. And then there’s a smaller set of others (like me, for instance) who do that one trial balloon activation, think “Well, I need to do a LOT more of that” and proceed to do many, many activations.
It turns out that Mr. Pareto fellow had a clue.
Am not retired, nor do I have an RV.
Just a regular activator who go to work everyday and happens to activate on my way to and from work.
So why not activate everyday just for the fun of it.
73 de N2NWK
Just to set a little context around Del’s comment…
Del’s activations account for a bit over 1% of all POTA QSOs.
More than 13,500 activations. More than 100 parks. More than half a million QSOs.
It’s mindblowing.