About ARO Field Atlas
ARO Field Atlas is an interactive map of outdoor radio locations worldwide. Thousands of parks, summits, nature reserves, and islands where licensed amateur radio operators set up portable stations. Whether you are a radio operator planning your next trip or just curious about this hobby, everything here is free to explore.
For radio operators
All programs on one map: POTA (Parks on the Air), SOTA (Summits on the Air), WWFF (World Wide Flora and Fauna), GMA (Global Mountain Activity), and IOTA (Islands on the Air). Live propagation data from PSKReporter, real-time solar and band conditions, greyline overlay, weather forecasts, activation planning, and personalized operator profiles. Every location links back to the program that owns it.
Who is behind it
ARO Field Atlas is an open project by Doulab, the brand of Santiago Arias Consulting, the legal entity. SAC is based in Switzerland. The project is built and maintained by Luis Santiago, who lives in Switzerland and operates as HB9HJU (amateur radio callsign) at home and as HI8ILO (amateur radio callsign) when operating from the Dominican Republic.
Doulab is the visible brand on the site. Santiago Arias Consulting is the legal entity behind copyright, license, and any data-controller text. This is the same pattern as GitHub under Microsoft or Basecamp under 37signals: a corporate parent, a product brand that stands on its own.
How we work
ARO is built under explicit innovation governance using structured frameworks (MCF and IMM-P® by Doulab). Every decision links to evidence; every claim links to a falsifier; every commitment carries a reversibility note.
Posture: solo founder, AI-heavily-assisted, patient and capital-efficient. Source-available under MIT (code) and CC BY-SA 4.0 (educational content). Built on Cloudflare. Privacy first, by design.
How we relate to existing programs
ARO Field Atlas is the only platform that shows POTA, SOTA, WWFF, GMA, IOTA, and more on one map. We follow the respectful third-party model that SOTLAS pioneered: every entity links back to the program that owns it, and we drive traffic to them. We add cross-program awareness, live propagation data, and activation planning tools on top.
Why Switzerland first
Switzerland is the founder's home country (HB9HJU). It has one of the most active SOTA associations in the world, a clear regulatory landscape under BAKOM, and rich Alpine cross-border peaks that make for good cross-program reconciliation cases. From there we expand outward: Germany, Italy, France, the rest of Europe, the United States, Latin America, and onward.
Data freshness
Entity registry (parks, summits, reserves): synced daily at 03:00 UTC from POTA, SOTA, WWFF, and BOTA upstream databases.
Activation data (leaderboard, activator profiles): refreshed twice weekly (Wednesday and Sunday at 22:00 UTC).
Live spots (map, bandmap): real-time from 5 sources (POTA, SOTA, PSKReporter, RBN, DX Cluster), refreshed every 60 seconds.
Solar and propagation: real-time from NOAA SWPC and hamqsl.com.
Weather forecasts: on-demand from Open-Meteo, 3-day forecast per entity.
Events calendar: curated, updated manually as events are announced.
Contact
For questions, corrections, partnership inquiries, or media: [email protected]. You can also reach Luis through QRZ at HB9HJU or HI8ILO. Once the project's GitHub repository is public, that will become the preferred channel for issues and contributions.