so i finally did my first activation on saturday, been meaning to do one for about a year and a half now and kept putting it off. took the ft-818 and a homebrew linked dipole up to a local W4V summit, nothing too crazy, maybe a 45 minute hike but still felt real good to finally be up there with the radio.

managed to get 4 contacts which i know is the minimum to claim the activation points, but im not sure i did the spotting right. i posted to SOTAwatch before i left the house with an estimated time but ended up being like 20 minutes late getting to the summit and i think chasers might have given up by then. ended up calling CQ on 40m for a good while before anyone came back to me. is there a way to update your spot from the summit? i had cell service up there which surprised me honestly.

also do i need to log the contacts anywhere specific or just submit through the SOTA database the normal way? i read the general summit to summit stuff but the logging part confused me a bit.

congrats on the first one, that feeling of making those 4 contacts from a summit never really gets old even after you've done dozens of them. to answer your question yes you can absolutely update your spot from the summit, just go to SOTAwatch and post a new spot with the corrected time or just spot yourself in real time when you're actually ready to operate. a lot of activators use the SOTA Spotter app which makes it really easy to self-spot right from your phone without messing around with the website. chasers are usually pretty patient and will often check back if they see a new spot go up.

for logging just enter everything in the SOTA database at sotadata.org.uk, you'll need the summit reference (should be something like W4V/XX-XXX), the date, your callsign, and the contacts with their callsigns, bands, and modes. it's a little clunky the first time but you get used to it fast. make sure the chasers log their side too or it'll just show as a uniqe on your end with no points for them.

yeah same thing happened to me on my second activation lol, posted a spot too early and showed up late and spent forever calling into the void. the self spotting from the summit is a game changer once you figure it out. also 40m was probably fine depending on time of day but a lot of chasers are listening on 20m too so if you have it linked in try both. S2S (summit to summit) contacts are worth extra points if you ever catch another activator while you're up there, those are always fun to snag.