so ive been chasing summits for about 6 months now and finally decided to stop being a spectator and actually get up on one myself. going up W4T/SU-001 tomorrow morning, planning to leave the trailhead around 6am to try and catch the morning ops crowd in europe on 20m before the band goes to pieces.

my setup is pretty minimal — FT-818 with a homebrew EFHW that i tuned up in the backyard last weekend, feeds into a 9:1 unun wound on an FT140-43 and it seems to work ok on 20 and 40 at least. got a 5ah lipo that should be more than enough for a few hours at 5w. i know you only need 4 contacts to qualify but i want to actually make some decent contacts not just scramble for the minimum if that makes sense.

my main worry is the sotawatch alerts thing — i posted an alert last night for 0730 local but im not sure if i got the time zone right. i put it in as UTC and i think i did the conversion correctly but honestly who knows. and i dont really know the etiquette for spotting yourself vs waiting for a chaser to spot you. do people normally self-spot or is that frowned upon?

anyway just kind of rambling here but if anyone has done this summit or has tips for first activations in general im all ears

self spotting is totally fine, practically expected these days especially if you're on a summit that doesn't have a lot of regular traffic. Most activators use the SOTA Spotter app or just text a spot in through the web, nobody thinks twice about it. The chasers WANT you to spot yourself so they can find you, thats kind of the whole point of the alerting system.

On the time zone thing — yeah UTC on sotawatch and if you got the conversion wrong by an hour thats not the end of the world, the chasers will hang around a bit if they see an alert posted. Just throw a self-spot up as soon as you're set up and on frequency and you'll have a pileup going inside of 3 minutes, these summit chasers are FAST. Seriously faster than any dx pileup ive worked, they're always listening.

Have a great time up there, first activation is something you dont forget. Make sure you log your summit reference correctly on the sota database when you submit, its the one thing people mess up and then wonder why the points didnt post.

oh man i remember my first activation i was so anxious about the whole thing and then within like 90 seconds of calling CQ SOTA i had 6 people in the log and it just felt incredible. you're going to love it.

one thing i'd say — if the band feels dead dont give up and move to 40 too quickly, sometimes there's a weird quiet spell and then suddenly everyone shows up. also make sure your summit reference on the spot matches exactly what's in the database, i once had a typo in mine and got some confused chasers asking where i was