so i finally did my first parks on the air activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house. been wanting to do this for months and kept putting it off. anyway i brought my KX2 and a simple end fed wire that i threw up in a tree maybe 20 feet and operated for about 2 hours.

here's the thing though — i only got 11 contacts. i know you need 10 to make an activation count but two of those were kind of sketchy, like i wasnt sure if the logging software actually saved them right because my tablet was acting weird in the cold. so i manually wrote them down in a notebook too just in case. uploaded the ADIF when i got home and it showed 11 confirmed contacts in the log so i guess it worked out.

my question is, does the activation still count if some of the signal reports were pretty rough? i had one guy come back to me like four times before he got my callsign and park reference right. and is there anything i should do differently for next time setup-wise, especially for getting spotted on the POTA network faster? i didnt really figure out the self-spotting thing until like 40 minutes in which probably cost me some contacts early on.

congrats on getting it done, that first one is always a little chaotic. yes it absolutely counts, 10 unique QSOs in the log and you're good, signal reports have nothing to do with whether an activation is valid. the other station confirming your call and park reference is all that matters and it sounds like they did.

for spotting — yeah that's the big thing new activators miss. download the POTA app on your phone before you go out, you can self-spot directly from there in like 10 seconds once you're set up and on frequency. a lot of hunters are just watching the spots page waiting for new activations to pop up so the sooner you get on there the faster the pileup starts. also if you can post on the POTA subreddit or a local club Facebook group the day before saying youre going out, some people will specifically look for you. once you get that going 10 contacts usually happens in the first 15-20 minutes honestly.

nice work getting out there. i did my first one earlier this year and had similar issues with the spotting thing, felt like i was just calling CQ into the void for a while before someone spotted me and then suddenly it was busy. the tablet issue in cold weather is real too, i now bring a little paper log as backup every single time just out of habit. better safe than having to dispute your own activation lol