Park Explorer
Park Explorer is the third entry in the Parks on the Air group in the sidebar, next to Hunting and Activate. It shows every POTA park in the world on one map — no live activator required and nothing to start. Use it to scout parks around your home, plan a trip, or just wander the globe.
Park Explorer is available when you're signed in.
The map
Parks stream in as clustered bubbles over the whole world. The clusters grow for a few seconds while the park database loads — that's normal. Zoom in and clusters split apart; zoom in far enough and every park stands alone as its own glyph.
Plenty of parks are published at the very same coordinate, and zooming can never separate those — they're zero distance apart at every scale. So they stay there as one glyph wearing a small count of how many parks are stacked on it, and its card opens as a stack: one card per park, each with its own see details row through to that park. The list beside the map is always the exhaustive one. See When Pins Land on the Same Spot.
Once the catalog finishes loading, Park Explorer uses whichever real Location Hamtrax has already resolved for you — callsign, device GPS, or manual — to frame you and the three closest parks with a little space beyond them. This opening frame reuses the shared Location already in Hamtrax; it does not itself request a fresh GPS fix. If Hamtrax has no resolved location, the map keeps its wide world view. If you start moving the map or select a park first, Park Explorer leaves the camera where you put it.
On a mouse, clicking a park glyph opens its detail view directly. Hovering first previews the same straight dark card used by the rest of the map. On touch, tapping selects the park, flies there, and pins that card. Tap any non-control area of the card — including its photo stack — or its gold see details row to open:
When Park Explorer's nearby list has already cached a park's photo set, that card shows up to four different tiny thumbnails as a stack on the right side of see details. The popup never starts another photo lookup; the additional thumbnail renditions load only when the stack appears.
- The park's name, reference, and location, plus a photo when one is available.
- Current weather at the park.
- Activation history and success statistics from POTA.
- A bright neutral Popular Park badge when the park belongs to Hamtrax's popular set, and a See geography row you can open for one colorful, full-width illustrated description of the place. The two are independent — a park may carry either, both, or neither. See Popular Park and geography.
The panel
The side panel is the same panel the Repeaters list uses — not a look-alike, the same one — so if you know one you already know the other. At the top, a lighter continuous smoked-metal program-owner card with a crisp neutral rim carries the page's name, a line counting what's in range (14 Parks within 50 miles), and, behind a small map pin, the name of the location Hamtrax has already resolved for you. That pinned line names the same place the opening map frame is built around and the same place the list below is measured from, so you can always see which near me the page means.
Beneath the card is the list itself: every park within 50 miles, nearest first. When that lookup can't finish — the park catalog hasn't landed on this device, or the search ran out of its twenty-second budget — the list says Directory unavailable and offers Try again instead of loading forever. Nothing within 50 miles is a different answer, and offers Search 150 miles.
The rows come 20 at a time. When more than twenty parks are in range, previous and next controls sit below the last card with the range you're reading between them — 1–20 of 100 — so the nearest few are what's on screen rather than the top of a long scroll; twenty or fewer and those controls don't appear. The count in the card above is unaffected, still naming every park within the radius rather than the ones on the page, and anything that runs the lookup again — searching a new place, Use my location, dropping a search to fly back to your own location, Search 150 miles, or Try again — starts you on the first page.
Every row uses the same rounded dark-metal chassis: a 1.5px metallic bezel around a smoked identity header, near-black body, and smoked information footer. The header divider is lit only at its two ends and fades away entirely across the middle of the card; the footer has no divider at all and is set apart by its own smoked surface. Popular Park and Activated badges never recolor or remove an edge. The header keeps the full park name on its own line. The next row is split into three equal sections: Park reference, Region, and Photos. The first two stay borderless — the reference uses the stronger heading tier, the region stays supporting body text — while the compact offset photo stack owns the right section. One quiet metric — 3.7 miles away — closes the card.
Parks in Hamtrax's popular set carry a bright neutral Popular Park badge at the bottom-left. An Activated badge in the same heading-text color sits directly to its right when that status applies, while distance remains aligned at the footer's far right. The badge marks the popular set and nothing else — it says nothing about whether Hamtrax has written the park up, and plenty of parks with a geography description are not in that set. When a park is activated but not popular, Activated becomes the footer's leftmost badge.
Where Hamtrax has freely licensed photography, up to four tiny photos stack in one footprint in the row's third section, each peeking out with a slight down-and-right offset (two on Popular Park rows). They stay supporting context rather than the structure of the card; without photos, that section stays quiet. Where one photographer uploaded several frames of the same subject, Hamtrax keeps one and gives the remaining slots to other photographers. Parks you have not activated carry no status badge — most of the catalog is new territory, so repeating NEW on nearly every row would only add noise. A park with a validated activation in your Logbook carries an Activated badge in that same bright neutral treatment, whether that activation is open or finished. Hunting a station at a park does not mark it Activated; the badge follows your activation folders, not contacts you made from elsewhere. The Activate tab reads the same signal in reverse: its Suggested Park card never proposes a park this badge would mark. Tap the row itself and its detail view opens, the same one a map glyph opens — the photos are not separate controls, and the full-size versions and their credits live in that detail view.
Nothing on this panel logs, spots, or starts anything — the Repeaters list's Log button and its manual-contact card are simply absent here.
One search box, two kinds of answer
The header card carries a single field — Search for parks — that takes a city, an area, or a park's name or reference. You never have to decide which kind of thing you're typing first, which is usually the one thing you don't yet know: both answer the same box, and the icon on each result says which it is.
| Icon | What the result is | What picking it does |
|---|---|---|
| 🌲 A green pine | A POTA park | Flies the map to that park and opens its details |
| 🗺️ A white map | A town, city, or area | Re-centers the whole nearby list there |
Parks are listed first, then places. Type at least two characters; part of a
park's name or its reference (like US-0817) both work.
Picking a place re-centers the whole list on that town and the map flies along with it — for scouting the parks around a campsite before you leave. While you're looking elsewhere, that town's name sits under the count wearing a small red ✕; tap the name anywhere to drop the search, fly back, and leave it a plain label on your own location again.
Browsing elsewhere never changes your saved location, and it never asks your device where you are. The only control on the panel that can reach for the device is Use my location, which appears when Hamtrax has no location for you at all.
The Repeaters list has the same box, but it takes places only — a repeater is identified by a callsign and a frequency rather than by a name you'd type from memory.
From browsing to activating
Every park detail view has an Activate Here button. Tapping it leaves Park Explorer and lands on the new-activation setup with that park pre-filled — the same setup screen you'd reach from Activate, ready to configure gear and start. With an activation already open the button is greyed out instead, with You're already activating beneath it: Hamtrax keeps one activation at a time, so finish the open one first.
Park Explorer itself never logs, spots, or starts anything. It's a map you can't accidentally commit anything from.