THE RULES
📜 The Main Rules
Our plain-words summary of the official POTA rules (KPC wrote it; it is not official). Read the real rules before your first activation.
- Make an account at pota.app (activators need one; it's free).
- 10 contacts in one UTC day make a full activation. The UTC day starts at midnight UTC: 8 PM Eastern / 7 PM Central in summer, 7 PM Eastern / 6 PM Central in winter. Contacts after that count toward the next day.
- You and all of your equipment must be inside the park boundary. The yellow dots on the POTA map are only approximate. Check the official boundary (our Am I in the Park? does this).
- Upload an ADIF log when you're done, under My Log Uploads on pota.app. Any logging program that makes a proper ADIF file works.
- Hunters don't send logs. POTA runs on the honor system: hunters get credit from the logs activators upload.
- Be a good guest: follow the law and the park's rules, listen to rangers, leave no trace, be courteous to other visitors, and follow the DX Code of Conduct.
- Overlapping parks (2-fers): where two POTA parks overlap, one contact can count for both. Parks that only touch at a border are not a 2-fer. A WWFF or SOTA reference on the same ground is a different program, not a 2-fer.
Sources: parksontheair.com/rules and the detailed rules at docs.pota.app.
These are short, plain-language summaries to get you started. The program's own rules always win: read the official pages linked here before you go, because rules can change.
KPC is an independent ham radio club. We are not part of Parks on the Air® and this is not official POTA material: the official site is parksontheair.com. Following POTA’s graphics policy, we don’t use the POTA logo on our pages.