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.
Very cool, Karl! Congrat’s on the 200! At 841 parks, NY is just extraordinarily POTA-rich. Is there any other geographic unit that matches it? (It looks like PA is second in the US.)
My ten-year-old phone won’t be doing satellite SMS, and they’ll be charging by the time I upgrade. But it sounds like I need to learn about APRS and SOTAMate someday!
Hi Todd,
I just did a quick data dump from the POTA database, and it looks like the award for the most parks goes to Victoria in Australia: 3462 entities. Second one on the list is England (which apparently is not further devices) with 3405 parks. This is followed by New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia (all of course in Australia). Now we move to our continent: British Columbia with 1224 and Ontario with 1162. Scotland has 1158, South Australia with 935. And finally, the first US state is New York with 841 active parks. I am now skipping over the non-US regions. Utah is #2 in the US with 658, Missouri with 520 and Pennsylvania with 486.
I am trying hard to keep New York the #1 state in the US – I added a new one on Long Island yesterday.
I had the same phone problem until September, when it was finally time to upgrade.
One thing to keep in mind is that SMS (or texting) might work in situations when a normal internet connection cannot be established, so it’s not a bad idea to have the APSPOT number and syntax stored on your phone.
Interesting to hear about your Satellite SMS usage. Despite what the Doomsters say, losing terrestrial network cell coverage these days increasingly doesn’t leave you scuppered when out in the bush.
Take a look at this technology we are now deploying in SAR helos here in Europe.
https://smithmyers.com/artemis-capability/
When the chips are down keep that phone on and have a small back up powerbank with you just in case! Helo can talk to/SMS you directly from altitude on line of sight without any network coverage.
Hi! I wrote an iOS app with a local POTA/SOTA sites database and automatically crafts the SMS to APSPOT. Check it out, it’s called Offline Spotter.
-Kris W1ADV
I’d be interested in learning more about your software you wrote to highlight activated vs not yet activated parks for you. In my mind it’s one of the biggest gaps in functionality on the pota.app website. That being said I am not in immediate need of this as I’m still stuck at my apartment for a year and a half, but I have been thinking about creating something similar before getting on the road.
Hi Sam,
What I am using is basically the “duck tape and baling wire” approach. You can download a CSV (comma separated values) file from your POTA “My Stats” for your activated parks. The same is also available for your hunted parks, in case you are interested in that as well. Once downloaded, I convert that with a Python script to JSON. In addition to that, I have a file that lists all the parks in New York. This is also in JSON format, and it has the coordinates and the park type for each entity. With some magic, I combine the two and end up with data that shows which parks I’ve activated, where they are, and their type. This then gets fed to a HTTP page that uses LeafletJS (https://leafletjs.com/) to add pins of different types and colors to a map. There are a lot of manual steps required, but it works for me.
This little key is so cute!
Hi Karl,
Congratulations on activating 200 parks, that is quite an accomplishment!!! I just finished my 99th, 100th, and 101st parks yesterday. 100 took me a long time, and all the close ones are finished…
Best 73 de Brian – K3ES