so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from me, K-4882 if anyone knows it, pretty quiet place on a saturday morning which was nice. i was honestly pretty nervous setting up because ive never done any portable ops before and i was worried about the antenna situation. ended up using my old G5RV thrown up between two trees with some paracord, ran about 25 watts on 40m with my ft-891 off a 20ah lifepo4 battery.

got my 10 contacts in about 40 minutes which felt like forever at the time but people on reddit said thats pretty normal for a first activation without being spotted. speaking of which i did eventually spot myself on the POTA app and after that it was basically a pile up, worked like 35 stations in the next 20 minutes which was wild. couple guys were hunters i guess trying to get the park confirmed.

my questions are pretty basic i think -- do i need to log differently for POTA vs a regular log, like does the park reference go somewhere specific in the adif export? and also is there a rule about how long you have to actually be in the park, i had to leave kind of abruptly because of family stuff and im not sure if i needed to stay longer after getting the 10. also want to try 20m next time, any tips for park to park contacts?

congrats on the first activation, 35 contacts after spotting yourself is actually a really solid first outing honestly. the logging question -- so the POTA adif needs the SIG and SIG_INFO fields, SIG should be POTA and SIG_INFO is the park reference like K-4882. most logging software handles this automatically if you set up a POTA activity but if youre exporting manually from something generic you might need to add those fields by hand. i use HAMRS for all my activations just because its built for exactly this and the adif comes out clean every time, no fussing around.

as for how long you need to stay -- you dont, there's no minimum time requirement once you hit your 10 QSOs youre done and can pack up whenever. the 10 is the only threshold that matters for a valid activation. for park to park just keep an eye on the POTA spots page filtered by P2P, when you see another activator spotted you can call them and both of you get credit. 20m is great for it because you can work parks that are states away which is kind of the fun part.

oh man park to park contacts are seriously addicting, i started hunting about 8 months ago and now i check the spots app like way too often during lunch at work lol. one thing i'd add is that some activators are really good about annoucing themselves as available for P2P if you just ask, like if the pileup dies down a bit and you say "any park to park" a lot of activators will come back to you first. not all of them do but most are pretty cool about it.

also seconding HAMRS, its what i started with and its pretty foolproof for POTA uploads.