so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state forest about 45 minutes from my house, KFF-something, i have the reference written down somewhere. brought my FT-818 and a random wire up in a tree and managed to get like 14 QSOs on 40m before the battery started getting low. logged it on the app and uploaded to the POTA website which was surprisingly easy actually.

couple things im not sure about though — i had one guy call me who gave me what sounded like a park reference number, does that mean he was doing a park to park? i didnt really know what to do so i just logged him normally. also i noticed some activators on the spots page were running like 50+ QSOs in an hour which seems insane to me, how are they doing that so fast, is it just CW or are they running a pile up on SSB somehow? im still pretty slow at working a crowd i guess

anyway it was a great time and the park was empty so nobody gave me weird looks for hanging wire in trees which is always a bonus

congrats on the first activation, 14 QSOs is a solid start especially if conditions werent great. and yes that guy was almost certainly doing a park to park, you log him exactly like you did but just note his park reference in the comments field when you upload. the POTA system matches it up on the backend so both of you get credit. worth going back and editing that log if you remember his callsign and can figure out what park he was at, sometimes you can look it up by his callsign on the activator log page.

as for the high QSO rates — yeah a lot of it is CW operators who can just rip through contacts, but theres also guys running FT8 from the field which honestly i have mixed feelings about but it counts. some SSB guys do get big pileups if theyre well spotted and conditions are good, but 50 an hour on phone takes some practice working a pile efficiently. youll get there, the main thing is just getting out and doing it.

oh man park to park contacts are the best part of hunting honestly, you should have seen the excitement on my end when i got my first P2P haha. dont stress too much about the QSO rate thing, ive seen people get competitive about it but the whole point is just being outside and making contacts. some parks are also just way more popular and get spotted constantly so they get a flood of hunters right away. your 14 from a random state forest is probably harder earned than someones 50 from a super popular national park tbh