so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state forest about 45 minutes from my house, K-4831 if anyone knows it. been hunting from home for a few months and thought yeah how hard can it be, i do this all the time from my shack. well. turns out dragging a radio into the field is a completely different animal and i made basically every rookie mistake possible.

first off i forgot my counterpoise at home. just completely left it on my workbench. so my end-fed was basically just flopped on the ground and my noise floor was awful, i was running my KX2 and it kept throwing up the SWR protection every few minutes. i ended up just wrapping some wire around a stick and clipping it to the bnc adapter which honestly worked better than nothing but i was still struggling.

second problem was i spotted myself on POTA.app and then immediately had like 12 people call me at once and i panicked and forgot how to do anything. i mean i know how to run a pileup from hunting but being on the other end of it for the first time your brain just goes blank. eventually settled down after like the 6th QSO and got into a rhythm.

ended up with 22 contacts over about 90 minutes on 20m SSB, which counts as a valid activation so i'll take it. already planning the next one with a proper parts list this time. anyone else remember their first activation being kind of a mess?

haha yes absolutely my first one was a disaster too. i drove an hour to the park, set everything up, called CQ for like 20 minutes and couldnt figure out why nobody was answering me. turns out i had the mic gain turned all the way down from when my wife was using the shack and complained about feedback. zero audio going out. i was just transmitting silence into the void for 20 minutes like an idiot.

the counterpoise thing is real though, i keep a spare coiled up in my kit bag now just because i know ill forget the main one eventually. for what its worth 22 contacts on your first time out with a compromised antenna is actually pretty solid, dont be too hard on yourself. the pileup panic is just something you have to work through a few times before your hands stop shaking lol

Welcome to the club of humbling first activations. I've been doing POTA for about two years now and I still have trips where something goes sideways. Last month I drove all the way out to a wildlife refuge, got everything set up beautifully, perfect weather, and then realized I had grabbed my logging tablet without the charging cable and it was at 4 percent battery. Ended up doing paper logging with a receipt from my glovebox and a pen I found under the seat, which actually worked fine but was not what I planned.

One thing that really helped me early on was making an actual physical checklist that lives in my go-bag and never leaves it. Sounds obvious but until I did that I was always reconstructing the list from memory the night before and always forgetting something. Also for the pileup anxiety thing — it genuinely does get easier. After maybe your fifth or sixth activation something clicks and you stop hearing it as a wall of noise and start being able to pick calls out. Just keep going out there.