In Parks on the Air News:
- Parks on the air is excited welcome a new batch of DX entities to the program this month. Be on the lookout for new parks getting added in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Kingdom of Eswatini, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Suriname, Guyana, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Falkland Islands. If your country, or one you’d like to represent, is not yet part of POTA please reach out via the ‘contact us’ link from Parks on the Air dot com, and we’ll help you get started as a volunteer country administrator.
- In upcoming events, we hope you join us for the upcoming Spring Support Your parks event on April 16th and 17th.
- We also hope you’ll join us this summer for our very popular annual plaque event, on July 16th and 17th, UTC. There will be three new plaques available for DX activators this year, one each for stations activating outside of the continental US, in IARU regions one, two and three. Sponsorship opportunities will be opening at the end of March, so if you or your club is interested in sponsoring a plaque, please send an email to N3VEM at parks on the air dot com. Due to steady growth, and improving conditions that make it possible to, as KN4MQR said on twitter “…load up a wet pasta noodle and get pileups for hours” we are expecting a very large turnout.
And now for the monthly stats update:
- February had a lot of activity for being the shortest month of the year! With an average of 270 activations happening every day, there ended up being just under 1,500 Operators who did approximately 7,500 Activations. They did this from over 3,000 different parks, in 31 different DX entities.
- The top activators for the month were N2NWK who did 217 activations and K4NYM who activated 78 different parks.
- The top hunter for the month was KO4GAR who hunted 1,044 parks, while making 1,796 QSOs as a hunter.
- In our POTA DX corner, the busiest countries have held their spots, with England as our Region 1 leader at 87 activations, Canada was our Region 2 leader with approximately 285 activations, and Japan as our Region 3, and overall DX leader, with 362 Activations.
- The top DX activator for the month was JI1ORE with 40 activations, from 39 different parks
- This is the second month in a row where our overall DX leader was from Region 1 – congrats!
- And last but not least, let’s check in on the progress of the Bailey-Sprott Challenge. In 2021 N5HA and W9AV each managed to hunt a park every day, so in 2022 we’re following along to see if anyone else can match their feat.
- At 59 Days into the year, we have 5 activators who have activated every day of the year, N2NWK, KE8PZN, K4NYM, KD4MZM, and KB3WAV. The pool of hunters still in the running has shrunk considerable, down from 91 last month, to just 53. To all of the Bailey-Sprott participants, congrats on your success so far, and we look forward to seeing how you do throughout the year!
POTA Video: