I built an app to help me spend more time outdoors—which is surprising, because the outdoors has repeatedly made it clear that it wants me dead.
June 2026 was a busy month for me. I finally upgraded to General, promptly discovered Parks on the Air, and became slightly obsessed. This is an odd match, because nature generally tries to kill me—mosquitoes consider me a buffet, plants make me itch, and weather becomes personally hostile whenever I unpack radio equipment. Apparently, adding radios and technology to the situation was all it took to make the outdoors a tad appealing.
When I started activating, I kept running into the same question: what POTA parks are near me right now?
So I (with a lot of heavy lifting from ChatGPT) built POTAble: POTA Park Finder. It’s an iPhone app that finds nearby POTA parks using your current location, or a spot you pick manually when you’re planning a trip. It can download park data for offline use, , open directions in your preferred map app, and keep track of parks you’ve worked or activated. It also lets you save private notes for the actually-useful stuff: where to park, good operating spots, whether there’s cell coverage, and which local wildlife has chosen violence against your allergies.
POTAble started as a nerdy little tool I wanted for myself, but it grew into something I thought other operators might enjoy too. POTAble is available now for iPhone on the Apple App Store, and an Android version is currently in the works whenever I get some spare time to finish it.