Parks On The Air (POTA)

Parks On The Air is a program where operators activate parks and other reference areas, and hunters chase those activations. Because one operator activates many different parks over time — and each park reference counts as a fresh catch — POTA hunting works differently from your normal wanted list. Wait and Pounce's POTA mode turns it into an activator-hunter: it will reply to any station that is currently spotted as a POTA activator, and show you which park they're in.

What it does

Unlike Marathon or the DXCC Program — which decide what you need from your local logbook — POTA status can't be read from your log. It is spot-driven: Wait and Pounce fetches the live list of activator spots from pota.app and cross-references it against every decoded callsign.

When a decoded station matches a currently-spotted activator:

• the row is highlighted in green, and
• the focus label shows the park reference it was spotted at (for example / US-1234).

If that station later answers you, the display switches to the normal "calling you" style, just like any other QSO.

Configuring it

In Settings → Parks On The Air, tick Enable reply to POTA. That's the only switch — there is no per-band selection. Once enabled, a POTA entry appears in your Priority Manager so you can decide where park activators rank against your other reasons to call.

How activations are found

• Live activator spots are fetched from pota.app every few minutes.
• Only FT8 and FT4 spots are kept — this is an FT8/FT4 assistant, so activators spotted only on CW or SSB are ignored.
• A decoded callsign that matches a spotted activator becomes a reply candidate, tagged with that activator's current park reference.

Same operator, new park

A hunter wants each park, not each operator. So POTA tracking is by callsign + park reference, reset at 00:00 UTC:

• Once you've replied to an activator at a given reference, that exact pairing won't be chased again the same UTC day.
• If the same operator moves to (or is re-spotted at) a different reference, they become a fresh candidate and Wait and Pounce will call them again.

Because a park is a new catch every time, Worked-Before rules are ignored for POTA — an operator you've already worked today is still worth calling from a different park.

POTA vs the other programs

POTA feeds the same reply engine as everything else and can be active alongside Wanted, Marathon, DXCC and Grid:

• Wanted / CQ Zone / Marathon / DXCC / Grid decide need from your logbook.
• POTA decides need from live pota.app spots — who's on the air in a park right now.

Where a park activator ranks against those is entirely up to your Priority Manager order.