POTA CONFIGURATION ISSUE

Last updated 3/26/2024

The POTA organization has made significant changes to the POTA database (Program Prefixes) over the last month. These POTA changes can break your SOTAMAT offline cellphone configuration for both POTA and SOTA users. Your POTA configuration might need to be rebuilt from scratch.

The POTA organization announced on 3/26/2024 that their changes are now complete. You need to fix your SOTAMAT configuration one last time and things should get back to normal.

Steps all users should perform one-time after 3/26/2024:

  • remove all POTA locations from your SOTAMAT configuration on this web site (here),
  • add back any POTA locations back to your SOTAMAT configuration on this web site (here), and note that the POTA organization has renamed many locations.
  • completely delete the SOTAMAT app from your cell phone (to delete the un-patchable POTA offline databases)
  • re-install the SOTAMAT app on your cell phone,
  • log into the SOTAMAT app with your callsign and password
  • reload your configuration into the SOTAMAT app
  • (optionally) reload the Peak/Park data (also on the Setup tab) into your mobile phone app.

If you only self-spot using SMS, eMail, or Garmin (known as 2-way commands) and you NEVER intend to use the SOTAMAT app on your mobile phone, then these issues do not apply to you and you can operate normally. The issue only applies to people using 1-way spotting via HF in the SOTAMAT mobile app.

Details:

POTA has made many Program Prefix changes over many weeks. The data migration is now complete.

For example, Canada used to have a Program Prefix of “VE” as in “VE-0005” for Banff National Park. Canada now has a Program Prefix of “CA” so Banff is now “CA-0005”, while the “VE” prefix now represents Venezuela. Your SOTAMAT phone configuration might reference a “VE” park “VE-0005” which now has two interpretations: Banff National Park in Canada, or Yurubi National Park in Venezuela depending on the time the configuration was loaded. The USA used to have a Program Prefix of “K-” and now uses “US-“.

SOTAMAT normally handles SOTA and POTA database changes daily and invisibly. Even though your off-the-grid phone has a SOTAMAT configuration which may have been pulled a long time ago, it normally works. SOTAMAT does this by tracking the time of every database change from the SOTA and POTA official databases, and the time when you pulled your configuration onto your phone. Normally the system can just ignore database records that are newer than the timestamp of when your phone grabbed your configuration.

However, since the POTA Program Prefix for countries, Locations, and parks have changed, and since these same prefixes are now swapped with other countries / programs, simply ignoring newer records in the database is insufficient. There are multiple concepts for all the “VE” locations and parks and the single SOTMAT timestamp can’t disambiguate the tables. Effectively POTA is “rewriting history” (changing what was previously a database primary key) from a code point of view. This not only breaks the mapping between your phone configuration and the server configuration for POTA, but can also break SOTA mappings since both programs are combined into a unified callsign suffix mapping.