So i finally did my first ever park activation yesterday at a state forest about 45 minutes from my house (K-4566 for anyone curious). Ive been licensed for about two years now but kept putting off doing POTA because it seemed complicated to log and i wasnt sure what gear to bring. Ended up just throwing my KX2 in a backpack with a 40 meter EFHW i made from a kit and a cheap fiberglass mast from amazon, found a picnic table near the parking lot and just started calling CQ POTA on 40.

honestly the pile up i got was way bigger than i expected. within like the first 20 minutes i had 12 contacts and ended up with 34 total before the battery started getting low. didnt even make it to 20 meters which i was planning on doing. a couple hunters called me and said they'd been waiting for someone to activate that park for months which made me feel pretty good about it.

the logging was the part i was most worried about but i just used a paper log in the field and then entered everything into the POTA website when i got home that night. uploaded the adif from HAMRS no problem. if anyone else is on the fence about trying this i really do think you should just go for it, the community is super welcoming and the hunters are patient when you're fumbling around.

congrats on the first activation man, that feeling when the pile up hits and you realize it's actually working is something else. 34 QSOs on your first time out is solid, some folks struggle to get the 10 needed to count the activation so you did great.

one thing i'd suggest for next time if you have the battery headroom — try popping up to 20 meters even just for 15 or 20 minutes. you'll sometimes pick up hunters from europe or the west coast depending on time of day and it really helps if you want to eventually chase the triple-triple award. also worth downloading the POTA spot app so hunters can see you're on the air, i forget to self-spot sometimes and it always slows things down when i do.

ive been wanting to try POTA forever but i have a tech license still and wasnt sure if there was even a point going out with just HF privileges on certain bands. do you need to be general or extra to really make it work or can tech ops still get enough contacts? sorry to hijack your thread just been curious about this for a while and your post made me think about it again.