so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from me and honestly it went way smoother than i expected. took my FT-891 and a random wire up in a tree, got there early, set up in maybe 20 minutes and made 15 contacts in the first hour which i guess is enough to count as an activated park right? i was using 40m mostly and switched to 20m for a bit but 40 was just killing it in the afternoon.

anyway a couple things i wasnt sure about. when i upload to the POTA site do i need to do anything special with the log file or does ADIF just work straight from my logging program? i was using log4om and it seemed to export fine but i wasnt 100% sure if there were specific fields needed. also someone spotted me on the pota.app and i suddenly got like a surge of hunters calling in, is that normal? felt like a mini pileup which was fun but a bit chaotic lol

also is there a way to spot yourself if nobody else does it first? i saw some people talking about self-spotting but wasnt sure if thats considered bad practice or whatever

congrats on the first activation, 15 contacts is definitely enough, you only need 10 to count so you had plenty of cushion. the ADIF upload on the pota website is pretty straightforward, just export from log4om and drag it into the upload page, it pulls the fields it needs automatically. the main thing to double check is that your park reference number is in there somewhere, either in a notes field or your logging program might have a spot for it depending on how you set things up. i had one upload get flagged early on because i had the wrong park ref format, it should be like US-1234 not just the number.

and yeah self-spotting is totally fine and honestly expected especially when youre just starting out. use the pota.app spot page or there are apps like hamrs and activator that let you self spot right from your phone. most activators do it, nobody thinks anything of it. the pile up thing is real once you get spotted, it gets easier to manage with practice, just slow down and work through them one at a time

yeah the pileup thing caught me off guard my first time too haha. i was not ready for 8 people calling at once. what helped me was just going back to basics, listen for the strongest signal, get the callsign, confirm it, log it, next. dont try to get fancy with it. some activators do split or whatever but for a normal activation on 40m its usually not necessary unless you get a really big spot surge.

also side note, if you ever want to try 2m fm activations those can be fun too especially if theres a repeater nearby, sometimes you get locals who are hunters and dont even know it yet which is kinda cool. different vibe than HF but worth doing at least once