There are all manner of ways to participate in portable operating. Some folks like to stay home and hunt, while others prefer to hit the field and put a signal on the air from a location that normally has no amateur radio presence.
There’s not much I like better than heading out to a park and lighting it up (radio-wise) for Parks on the Air® (POTA) or World Wide Flora & Fauna (WWFF). But sometimes activating one park just isn’t enough. I enjoy the planning and logistics of picking multiple parks in an area and figuring out the best way to activate them.
A few years ago, I set a goal of activating every POTA reference in Ohio. Since I’d already earned the Activated All Ohio State Parks Award, that only left me with a couple hundred locations to activate. Easy, right?
Several new POTA references had just been added in Ohio, so this seemed like a good time to do it. I spent lots of time analyzing maps and creating spreadsheets to calculate my best routes.
When traveling two or three hours to reach a park, it makes sense to activate as many as possible while you’re in the area. Sometimes there’s even good logic in staying overnight someplace along the way.
You may imagine an activator waking up on Saturday morning, looking at the POTA map and saying, “I think I’ll activate six parks today.” That’s great if you can do that, but experience has shown me that there is a lot more planning involved in a successful rove. It’s more than simply stringing a bunch of parks together and hitting the road.
Step one is to pick your target area. One of my roves was into southeast Ohio. That takes in a lot of real estate, so I chose a single park for my home base and picked several parks in the surrounding area to add to my “hit list” for each trip. Even after limiting the area, it still took a few trips to activate them all.
Once your hit list is established, you can use Google Maps and other mapping resources (see my article on “Mapping Resources for POTA”) to identify possible operating locations.
Once those operating locations are identified, it’s time to plug them all into Google Maps and figure out your route. Move the order of the stops around and look for ways to reduce unnecessary driving and backtracking.
Don’t forget to add a reasonable amount of time for setup, teardown, operating, and breaks. Remember: If a proposed route only allows 20 minutes at each stop, it is doomed to fail!
If you’re also active in the WWFF program, you’ll want to note whether any of your stops qualify for that program as well. If so, you’ve found a dual park. You can check for dual-park status by going to CQParks.net and performing a simple lookup.
| POTA # | WWFF # | Description | Coordinates (or Map links) |
|---|---|---|---|
| US-8911 | KFF-6208 | PA 214 State Game Land | 41.605, -80.3792 |
| US-8910 | KFF-6207 | PA 213 State Game Land | 41.55, -80.1854 |
| US-8964 | KFF-6800 | PA 269 State Game Land | 41.7908, -80.2318 |
| US-8850 | KFF-6781 | PA 152 State Game Land | 41.8473, -80.2266 |
| US-8800 | KFF-6162 | PA 101 State Game Land | 41.8596, -80.488 |
| One example of my info sheet for a rove in Pennsylvania. I keep this information in the Notes app on my phone, where I can easily refer to it during the trip. | |||
For POTA, 10 contacts are required for a valid activation, while WWFF requires 44. One important difference between the two programs is that you can accumulate your 44 WWFF contacts over several trips, while your 10 POTA contacts must be made during the same UTC day.
Because I frequently activate references that qualify for both programs, I note both reference numbers in the worksheet I create when planning a rove.
If, for some reason, you can’t get 10 contacts at a reference, you should still submit them. The contacts are still valid, even if you didn’t reach the required number for a complete activation.
I normally don’t pull the plug immediately after QSO number 10. Instead, I prefer to make at least 12 to 15 contacts before moving on. That gives me a little breathing room in case I’ve made a logging mistake or discover another problem later.
Or, if I have a pileup going, I try to work as many callers as possible until the crowd eases. I hate leaving callers waiting, but, unfortunately, it does sometimes happen. After all, there are more parks waiting.
A Rove is 1 Situation Where Simplicity Really Pays Off.
In my case, I use a Yaesu FT-891 and a Yaesu ATAS-120A Auto Active Tuning Antenna. The radio sits on a small desk that rests on my truck’s center console—when the truck isn’t in motion, of course. This allows me to set up quickly when I arrive.
I park, attach the antenna to the mobile mount, get the radio ready, and start operating.
When I’m finished, the radio gear gets moved to the passenger seat, and I head to the next location. If I’m traveling only a few miles, I’ll leave the ATAS-120A mounted. Otherwise, it gets stowed for the drive.
There are certainly times when I’ll put up a wire antenna during a portable activation, but that changes the timetable considerably. I normally don’t use a wire antenna unless I plan to be at that location for a couple of hours.
The best antenna for a rove isn’t necessarily the antenna that will produce the strongest signal. Sometimes it’s the antenna that gets you on the air in five minutes instead of 20.
Another time-saving trick is to drive into the target area the evening before the rove. A hotel room or campsite the night before can help you hit the ground running without spending a significant part of your activation day driving to your first stop.
I’ll occasionally drive into the area Friday evening, stay overnight, and begin the rove Saturday morning only a short distance from my first activation. This can turn an overly ambitious itinerary into a very comfortable one.
Of course, it’s always a good idea to let someone know where you’re planning to be, particularly if the rove takes you into remote areas. Having a reasonably detailed itinerary makes that easy. Someone at home can know the general area where you should be at different points during the day.
And remember that the schedule is a plan, not a contract. If I’m running behind, I would rather drop a park from the day’s itinerary than spend the entire afternoon rushing from one activation to another.
Enter AI
When I started doing these roves, the planning was done manually. I’d study maps, make lists, enter destinations into Google Maps, move them around, recalculate driving times, and try another combination.
Today, there’s another tool available: artificial intelligence (AI).
For a recent experiment, I gave AI a list of parks I wanted to activate and supplied the same kinds of constraints I would normally use when planning a rove: my starting location, activation locations, expected operating time at each stop, and the fact that I wanted an efficient route with as little backtracking as possible.
Then I asked it to build the itinerary.
Here’s the interesting part: I had already planned the route myself, so I had something to compare the AI-generated route against. The result was remarkably close to the route I had developed myself—but AI did it in seconds. What a time-saver!
You could give an AI assistant a list of POTA refe…