Now if you're already familiar with Parks on the Air, you know there are two participants in the POTA scheme, activators and there's hunters. In this video I'm going to show and explain my hunters set up. The hardware and software I use and then I'll let you follow me through my process of hunting parks, logging contacts and re-spotting activators as I work my way through the bands.

For starters My hunters base station rig is the ICOM IC-7300. It's connected to a home brewed fan dipole with elements cut for 10, 20 and 40 meters. It's situated north and south so that it radiates east and west. It's supported from a fiberglass mast with the center up about 22 feet. I've tried it at 33 feet, but for whatever reason it works the best lower. It's fed to the shack via 75' of LRM 400 coax that wraps around the house along the rain gutters and under siding and finally through a window. Once in the shack I use the stock hand held mic that I've attached to a boom arm for easy access. I listen to the radio via a Bob Heil Pro 7 Headset even tho I don't use the head sets mic. Long story, but I had problems with the mic and was told by heil that ICOM's service center was telling them that they were getting IC-7300 in for service that had been damaged from the heil Pro 7 mic. I still like the headset for listening, but until Icom and heil get their act together I'd just soon not damage my radio. So I'll be sticking to the handmic for now, besides, with the hand mic I get many unsolicited great audio reports that I never got with the heil mic. My rig is powered by an old Astron 35 amp power supply that's tough as nails, I bought it 10 years ago from the estate of a silent key, so I'm not sure just how old it is, but it's diffidently a work horse and more than likely it will outlive me! I've got the rig interfaced to a Dell all in one computer that sets on a stand above the rig and is connected via a 3' USB cable that has ferrite beads at each end and an added ferrite core with several loops of the cord wound inside. This along with the rig being grounded to a 8' ground rod outside the shack has proved to eliminate any RF problems I've encountered. A unshielded USB cord caused all kinds of problems with the computer when I initially set it up. There's of course a mouse and keyboard. The last bit of hardware is my ipad that set on a little stand right above the mouse so that I can easily tap on the screen for data entry. The ipad is used to solely run the POTA app. The computer runs a program called win4icomsuite. When running it consists of two windows, one that gives me complete access to all the features of the radio and the second is a keypad that lets me control VFO A by typing in frequencies. The program has also been set up to launch my logging software which is N3FJP. Which in turn receives data from the radio to automatically logs the frequency of each contact. It also import the QRZ data of any call sign entered into the callsign field.

My typical hunting session starts by accessing the pota app to see what stations are spotted. I sort the pota page by band, mode and then frequency. Starting at the top of the list I enter the frequency of the station I'm hunting into win4com, On The N3FJP window I enter the stations callsign and park number. Then when I'm sure I've got the callsign and park number right I throw may call sign out when the activator calls QRZ. . If successful, I log the signal reports and hit enter to log the QSO. I then hit the respot button on the ipad and enter my signal report and location. Then it's off to the next park. I work my way through the list this way until I've worked as many station as possible. Once I've worked all the spotted stations on that band, I enter in the next band and mode and work those station the same way. Okay, so let work a few stations so you can see my work flow and how this all down. Now that's how I work as a hunter. Over the last 6 months I've made over 3000 POTA QSOs with this method. So. Get out there, get on the air and start hunting today.
There's no reason you can't start POTA right now, If you don't have a radio yet, start listening on websdr.com. Listening is the first step. Absorb all the info you can from the POTA site, listen, listen and listen some more and in no time you'll be a seasoned hunter. Okay, so that's part one of my POTA series. In part two I'll go over a typical POTA activation, From packing my gear to what I like to take for snacks. I'll introduce you to my mobile ham shack (the potamobile), show you a great portable antenna, how I tune it as well as my radio operations while activating a park. so be sure to hit the subscribe button so you'll be notified when new videos come out. Also, be sure to hit the like button and leave a comment, I'd love to hear about how you hunt POTA and any tips or tricks you might have to help me out. Thanks for watching and as always, I hope you have a great day!