so i finally did it, been putting it off for like 6 months because i kept telling myself i wasnt ready or my setup wasnt good enough or whatever excuse i could think of. went out to a state forest park near me saturday morning with my KX2 and a random wire thrown up in a tree and just... did it. logged 32 QSOs in about an hour and a half which i know isnt a huge number but for a first activation i was pretty happy with it.

the thing that surprised me most was how many hunters were already waiting once i spotted myself on pota.app. like within 2 minutes of putting the spot up i had a small pileup going on 40m. wasnt expecting that at all, had to slow down and actually work a bit of a system instead of just casually chatting like i normally do. ended up doing a bit of running which i've never really done before.

one thing i wasn't sure about — do you need to log the park reference on every single QSO entry or just note it somewhere in your log? i was using my phone with hamrs and it seemed like it attached the park ref to all of them automatically but i want to make sure before i upload to the pota website. anyway if anyone else has been on the fence about doing an activation just go do it, totally worth it

congrats on the first one, 32 is a solid number especially for 40m with a wire. honestly the pileup thing catches a lot of people off guard the first time, the hunters are out there refreshing that map constantly.

for the logging question — yeah hamrs should be tagging every QSO with the park reference automatically, when you export the adif and upload it the site reads the sig and sig_info fields. just open the adif file in a text editor real quick before you upload and spot check a few entries, you should see something like SIG: POTA and SIG_INFO: K-XXXX in there. if it looks right you're good. had a guy in our club upload a whole activation without the park ref attached once and had to resubmit everything manually, not a huge deal but worth the quick check.

nice work. i did my first one earlier this year and yeah the hunters find you SO fast once youre spotted. kind of wild actually. i was nervous about the pileup too but you just settle into a rhythm pretty quick. what park was it if you dont mind me asking