POTA Unactivated Park Finder

The POTA Unactivated Park Finder (aka newparks.py) is a simple Python script that queries the Parks on the Air API to find all parks that have never been activated, and produces a KML file of them that you can view in e.g. Google Earth.

There is also an expanded version, parksbylastactivated.py, which produces a KML file of all parks, coloured by the time since last activation on a scale of red (many years ago) to green (today), using black to represent never-activated parks. This might help you find some extra parks that, while they have been activated in the past, could do with some love.

What?

Parks on the Air is an Amateur Radio activity where radio operators set up portable stations in country parks, nature reserves, etc. to enjoy the great outdoors alongside their hobby.

There is a set list of parks world-wide which count for the program, which is regularly updated to include new locations by a team of volunteers.

"Activating" a park consists of going there, setting up a portable radio station, and making at least 10 contacts with other radio stations around the world, following the POTA Rules.

This software helps POTA activators find new parks that no-one has ever activated before, hopefully finding interesting new places to try setting up a radio station!

Usage

Usage with venv and pip on Linux is recommended, but it will work fine wherever you use Python and however you like to manage it.

A complete example for Debian & derivatives such as Ubuntu:

sudo apt install python3 python3-pip python3-venv
git clone https://git.ianrenton.com/ian/newparks.git
cd newparks
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 newparks.py
deactivate

Then open the resulting newparks.kml in Google Earth Pro (desktop), Google Earth (web) or another KML viewer of your choice.

newparks.py also accepts command-line parameters to restrict the result to a single program. For example, to restrict the output to just GB parks, run newparks.py GB. The output file will be named newparks-GB.kml. You can also provide the --list argument on the command line to print a list of the programs.

The use of parksbylastactivated.py is similar, but here we have to do additional requests to the POTA API to get the last activated date, so to spare their servers we don't want to do this for every park in the world. parksbylastactivated.py therefore takes a single parameter, which is your Maidenhead grid locator. It will then fetch only parks within 1 degree latitude and longitude of you. So for example:

python3 parksbylastactivated.py IO90br

The resultant parksbylastactivated.kml file can be viewed as above.

Warning

There may be reasons why a particular park has never been activated, such as it being closed but not yet removed from the system, a change of ownership, unclear legality about amateur radio operations in the park, etc. You should still do your own research to find out if it is possible and legal to activate a park, regardless of whether it appears within this software or on the POTA website.

This software makes a number of queries to the "public but unofficial" POTA API. It caches the result for one day, to avoid overloading the servers with repeated requests. Please do not abuse the API by hammering it with an undue number of requests.