so i finally did my first activation last weekend, went up to a summit near me that had a pretty easy trail, only about 2 miles in. brought my FT-818 and a end fed wire thrown over a branch and honestly was pretty nervous i wouldnt get the 4 contacts needed to qualify it. ended up getting like 9 QSOs in maybe 25 minutes which felt great, a couple of them were chasers who already knew my callsign from the sotawatch spot i put up before i left the car which blew my mind a little.

anyway my questions are kind of basic — when i look up a summit reference like W6/NC-042 or whatever, the number at the end, is that just an arbitrary ID or does it mean something about the difficulty or points value? and also i noticed some summits show as 1 point and some are like 10 points, is that purely based on elevation gain from a base reference or is there more to it?

also one thing that went wrong — i forgot to actually log the UTC time during the contacts and just wrote down local time in my notebook, had to convert everything later which was a pain. lesson learned i guess. anyone else do dumb stuff like that on their first one?

congrats on the first activation, 9 contacts on your first time out is really solid especially if you were nervous. the reference number is just an identifier within each association and region, doesnt reflect difficulty or points at all, just how they catalogued the summits when setting up the program. the points are entirely based on topographic prominence, so a summit needs to be a certain height above surrounding terrain and the points scale with how high it is — im pretty sure anything above 2500m or so gets the full 10 points but the exact cutoffs are in the SOTA general rules doc on the website if you want the specifics.

the UTC thing trips up almost everybody at first. i just set a second clock on my phone to UTC now and glance at it between contacts, takes like 10 seconds to set up and saves a lot of headache. some people use logging apps like HAMRS or VK port-a-log that handle the time automatically which is nice when youre cold and tired and just want to work stations.

the UTC thing yeah i did the exact same thing my first couple times out lol. also accidentally logged the wrong summit reference once because i had two tabs open on sotawatch and clicked the wrong one for my spot. the activation still counted but i had to email the MT to get it sorted which was kind of embarrassing.

chasers are so enthusiastic though right, like its really motivating when someone comes back to you immediately because they saw your alert. i had one guy who chased me on 3 different bands in like 20 minutes on my second activation which was wild to me. makes you want to go out every weekend honestly