Many thanks to Karl (K5KHK), who shares the following guest post, which initially appeared on his ham radio blog:
POTA Spotting via Low Earth Orbit
by Karl (K5KHK)
For way too long, I have had the “Working from 200 different units” awards dangling in front of my face: I was at 197 unique parks activated. Only three more! Sunday 11/3/24 was a beautiful day with nothing else to do, so I was planning to hit the road. I needed three parks that I had not yet activated and I wanted them to be relatively close to each other.
A while ago, a created software that takes my activation stats from the POTA site and marks entities in New York with different colors and symbols based on there type and if I had them activated or now. I looked at the map and found the three closest entities that would not require “special equipment” like a boat.
The first one on the list was Honeye Creek Wildlife Management Area – US-9032 – followed by Honeye Inlet Wildlife Management Area – US-8642. These two are close to each other. My third planned park was about an hour away from the second stop: Rattlesnake Hill Wildlife Management Area – US-8626.
On the Road
I got on the road a little later than planned – this was the day after changing the clocks back to standard time and I wanted to have plenty of daylight left.
At the first stop, everything went smoothly. I put up my 31ft Jackite mast with the 30.5ft random wire going to a 9:1 LDG Unun and a 1:1 LDG choke. The coax then goes to a LDG AT-200Pro II tuner and my Yaesu FT-857D dialed down to 5W. This is my standard configuration when I am operating from the car.
This was my first outing with a new key: The Putikeeg Mini straight key.
I started by looking for active spots on 40m and found one, a minute later, I had KD3D in the log. I looked for a free frequency, spotted myself and finished with 13 contacts in my log about half an hour later.
After a 10 minute drive, I set up at my second location. The little wrinkle in my plan here was that I had no cell coverage to spot myself. My last spot from the earlier park was less than 30 minutes ago, so if I would have called CQ without a new spot, I would have been re-spotted at my previous park. Not what I wanted.
There are of course ways to get spotted without cell service. APRS over HF is an option, SOTAMate via FT8 will work as well, but I wanted to try something new…
Satellites to the rescue!
The recently released iOS version 18 came with a new feature: Apple has supported making emergency calls via low earth orbit (LEO) communication satellites since the iPhone 14, but until recently, this was reserved for contacting emergency services. With iOS 18, this feature was extended to text messages – both SMS and iMessages.
When no cell coverage is available, the top of the phone’s screen shows “SOS” and a picture of a satellite:
So how does one spot via this satellite connection?
The APSPOT service (https://apspot.radio) got its name from spotting via APRS, but has since added Winlink and SMS spotting.
In preparation for a situation like this, I had tried a test spot via APSPOT and SMS a few weeks before, just to make sure it worked, and the last time I was without cell service, I tried sending a message via the iPhone’s satellite feature. This feature only becomes available when there is no cell service.
Today, I was ready to put these two things together and spot myself.
Sending a text via the satellite is not as straight forward as via a cell tower: The phone “knows” where the satellites are and instructs the user to point the phone the right way.
I queued up my text, waited until communications with the satellite were established and then sent the text.
To spot an activation with a text message, the format required is this:
“!<Callsign> <Activity> <Ref> <Frequency In MHz> <Mode> <Comment(Optional)>”
In my case, I used the following string:
!K5KHK POTA US-8624 7.0445 CW
This resulted in the downswing reply after a while (keep that phone pointed at the satellite as it moves across the sky):
SUCCESSFULLY SPOTTED FOR US-8624 TO pota.app
And sure enough, my CQ calls got answered.
This new feature is free to use for now. Apple just invested $1.1 billion into Globalstar’s satellite network (https://www.streetinsider.com/dr/news.php?id=23913530), that’s probably a pretty good indication that they are planning to eventually make a buck or two from this service.
Using the iPhone to follow a satellite is pretty easy, the phone will prompt which way to turn, and the image at the top of the screen shows how well the phone is pointed towards the satellite.
Retrieving Spots
APSPOT does not just allow an activator to spot, but also provides a way to get spots:
Spots POTA cw 5
This command will return five CW POTA spots in five separate texts:
So, back to my activation: I finished my second activation of the day with 13 QSOs, five on 40m and eight on 30m. And after a short trip to my third park, I finally ended up with activations in 200 unique POTA entities.
Don’t forget, this feature can be used in other situations as well. You may want to practice it so that if you ever have to use it (either to spot yourself, or in an emergency), you know how it works.