The Volunteers Rebuilding Ham Radio’s Fastest-Growing Movement
Inside the enormous effort to modernize Parks on the Air before its own success overwhelms the system that built it.
On a gray Sunday morning at Dayton Hamvention 2026, while much of amateur radio’s largest gathering had already begun drifting toward flea markets, radios, and the long drive home, one conference room inside the Greene County Fairgrounds remained unexpectedly full. The people who stayed behind weren’t there for a DXpedition slideshow or a new radio unveiling. They were there to hear three volunteers talk about databases, cloud architecture, award engines, and the future of Parks on the Air.
Under ordinary circumstances, that would sound like a guaranteed way to empty a room.
Instead, operators leaned forward in their chairs.
At the front stood Parks on the Air (POTA) board members, Mark Torigian K8MST, alongside Mike Case W8MSC, and Thom Martin W8TAM—the latter two part of the founding technical core behind one of the fastest-growing programs in amateur radio. Torigian opened with a joke about “computer guys” but the mood inside the room quickly shifted into something more serious. This was not merely a software update presentation. It was an unusually candid look at the strain created when a volunteer-built hobby project suddenly becomes global infrastructure.
“These guys are the subject matter experts,” Torigian told the crowd. “They work hard.”
That understatement hung over the rest of the session.
Because what Parks on the Air’s leadership described over the next hour was not a routine modernization effort. It was a complete architectural rebuild of a platform that now supports nearly 85,000 operators worldwide, processes millions of QSOs annually, and has outgrown nearly every assumption made when the original system was assembled years earlier by a handful of volunteers teaching themselves as they went.
The remarkable part is that none of this was planned.
Parks on the Air was never designed as a large-scale global platform. It evolved into one almost accidentally, growing out of the energy created by the ARRL’s National Parks on the Air event in 2016 and the parallel Michigan State Parks on the Air program that followed. What began as a continuation of portable operating enthusiasm slowly transformed into something much larger: a worldwide operating ecosystem with its own culture, statistics economy, software infrastructure, awards architecture, and social identity.
In the early days, the technical foundation was almost laughably modest. The original site ran on what Mike Case described as a “home lab style system,” a small Linux-based server with limited memory and minimal processing power. The platform used a classic LAMP stack—Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP—because, as Case admitted with a grin, “that was the thing at the time.” Jeremy Turner N0AW, and Colby Dillion WR5B, were also instrumental in shaping those early systems, and the current platform still relies heavily on software they developed, with both continuing to provide occasional support behind the scenes. The interface itself was functional but rough, packed with statistics tables and improvised design choices created by volunteers who were simultaneously building the airplane and teaching themselves aeronautical engineering.
At the time, perhaps 1,200 people used the system.
Today, the scale is almost difficult to comprehend within the context of amateur radio. Parks on the Air now consumes roughly $6,000 per month in IT infrastructure costs alone, with cloud-hosted systems dynamically scaling to support spikes in traffic and spotting activity. The original architecture survived far longer than anyone expected, largely because the developers continuously patched, modified, and expanded systems that were never intended to support a global audience.
What emerged during the Hamvention session was a portrait of technical debt not in the abstract Silicon Valley sense, but as a deeply human problem. Every successful feature added over the years created additional complexity underneath. Awards were bolted onto systems that had never been designed to generate awards. International expansion introduced geographic and political complications nobody had anticipated. Mapping systems multiplied. Spotting infrastructure evolved. APIs emerged unofficially through reverse engineering because users wanted integration tools faster than the organization could formally provide them.
And all of it remained volunteer-run.
Thom W8TAM acknowledged the reality bluntly. The core database structure still traces back to decisions made in 2018. In technology terms, that is ancient history. More importantly, the aging architecture has become increasingly difficult to maintain because fewer volunteers possess the specialized knowledge required to work on it. The problem is not simply performance. It is sustainability.
That realization sits at the heart of what I will call, unofficially, POTA 2.0.
The rebuild now underway is not merely about adding features. It is about creating a platform that future volunteers can realistically maintain without requiring enterprise-level engineering expertise. The new system, built around the Laravel framework and redesigned cloud infrastructure, aims to simplify development while simultaneously expanding capability. Public APIs, multilingual support, integrated documentation, improved accessibility, enhanced mapping, club-specific statistics, faster log processing, and expanded award systems are all part of the roadmap.
One of the names that surfaced during the presentation was James Linden VE3JLN, a developer who was not present in Xenia but whose work sits underneath much of the transition now underway. As the Parks on the Air team described the enormous challenge of rebuilding award systems, recalculating activations, and restructuring years of accumulated data into internationally standardized formats, they paused to acknowledge Linden’s contribution directly. According to the presenters, he carried “a lion’s share” of the technical work required to recalculate awards and rescore activations as the system migrated away from its older U.S.-centric structure toward internationally standardized geographic coding. That kind of invisible backend labor may not generate the excitement of a new feature announcement, but it forms the foundation making the larger POTA 2.0 transition possible in the first place.
Yet throughout the presentation, the technical discussion kept circling back to something more philosophical.
How do you modernize Parks on the Air without losing what made people fall in love with it in the first place?
What became clear in Xenia was that the future of Parks on the Air will not be determined solely by software frameworks, cloud infrastructure, or database migrations. It will depend on whether the volunteer culture that built Parks on the Air in the first place can continue scaling alongside the technology itself. The radios may still be portable, improvised, and deeply human, but the infrastructure supporting them has quietly become one of the most ambitious volunteer-run systems in amateur radio.
Click on the link below to watch the presentation at Dayton Hamvention 2026:
The slides from the presentation:
