New Park Finder

"New Park Finder" is a utility to help Amateur Radio operators participating in Parks on the Air (POTA), Summits on the Air (SOTA) and Bunkers on the air (WWBOTA) to find places that they have not yet operated from ("activated") or have not been activated at all.

Use it at https://newparks.m0trt.radio.

Usage

To use the software, start by entering your callsign at the top left. This allows the software to distinguish between your activations, and other people's. Entering this is optional, so if you don't have a callsign or just want to see which parks have been activated in general, you can leave it empty.

Next, position your view where in the world you are interested in. The Search button should be available. If not, and there is instead a prompt telling you to zoom in, you will need to zoom in (scroll wheel or pinch) until the button appears. This is to avoid overloading the API with a large number of requests for reference statuses over a very wide area.

Once the button is available, clicking it will cause the software to query the API, and if everything is working you should start to see markers appear on your screen. (If you don't, but the status shows "OK", there may just not be any parks in your view. If the status shows "Error", the API may be offline.)

Markers initially appear grey, showing that the software knows a reference is there, but has not yet queried its status. Over the next few seconds, grey markers should be replaced by coloured ones. The colours indicate the reference's status as follows:

• Grey markers with an "hourglass" symbol are locations for which data has not yet been loaded. (Wait a few seconds!)
• Red markers with a "star" symbol show locations that have never been activated. A "cross" appears instead if you are filtering activations by year, so it's more clear that it is not necessarily an all-time new one.
• Yellow markers with a "person" symbol show locations that have been activated by other people, but not by you
• Brown markers with a "check list" symbol show locations that you have attempted to activate, but not succeeded.
• Green markers with a "tick" symbol show locations that you have successfully activated.
• Green markers with a "medal" symbol show locations for which you were the first activator.

If you've selected to filter by year, the indications are for that year, e.g. "activated by other people that year," or "you were the first activator that year".

You can click on any marker to see its reference, name, and information about its activation status.

Notes

This software relies on the POTA, SOTA & WWBOTA APIs to work. POTA's is an "unofficial" and undocumented API, so it is subject to change without warning. If you encounter problems with the New Park Finder, please send me an email.

API functions are publicly available due to the goodwill of the POTA, SOTA & WWBOTA volunteer developer teams. Please try not to make them regret this decision by hammering the API with large numbers of requests.

Always do your own research to find out if it is possible and legal to activate a location, regardless of whether it appears within this software or on the programme website, and abide by the programme rules.

Credits & Motivation

It was written by Ian Renton, callsign MØTRT. I just wanted an easy way to visually keep track of which local parks were new and which I hadn't activated yet, when a large number of local parks were added to the POTA system in 2024-2025.

It is based on a couple of my previous Python projects, POTA Unactivated Park Finder (which finds all unactivated parks globally, and produces a KML file) and POTA Local Parks Progress, which shows a command-line tabulated list of your nearest parks and their status.

Source Code & Licence

New Park Finder is open source software released into the public domain. You can view the source code and contribute to the project here.

Privacy

The site uses no trackers or cookies. Your callsign, last viewed map position, and your home marker position (from geolocation or because you moved it manually) are all stored locally on your computer, and are not uploaded anywhere. You can clear them from your browser's "Local Storage" settings.

Third Party Libraries

The project contains a self-hosted copy of Font Awesome's free library, in the /fa/ directory. This is subject to Font Awesome's licence and is not covered by the overall licence declared in the LICENSE file. This approach was taken in preference to using their hosted kits due to the popularity of this project exceeding the page view limit for their free hosted offering.

Other third party libraries, such as Leaflet and jQuery, plus many plugins for them, are included from a CDN in the head of index.html.

This project would not have been possible without these libraries, so many thanks to their developers.