so i finally did my first ever SOTA activation last weekend, been chasing summits for about 6 months and kept telling myself id get out there and actually do one. picked a pretty modest summit, W4T/SU-056 i think, only 4 points but figured it was a good one to start with since the trail wasnt too brutal and i knew id already be nervous enough without also dying on the way up

brought my KX2 and a linked dipole i built from the sotabeams design, threw it up in an inverted V off a painter pole i strapped to my pack. got my four contacts to activate it but man the band conditions were rough that day, 20m was just dead for me, ended up working mostly on 40 which i wasnt expecting. spotted myself on SOTAwatch and got a little pileup going for maybe 10 minutes which was honestly really fun, way more fun than i thought it would be

the thing that went wrong was i forgot to pre-program my summit reference into my logging app so i was trying to type it in by hand while also running the radio and it was just chaos. also brought way too much food and not enough water which is a classic mistake i guess

anyway planning my second one for next month, thinking about trying a 6 pointer. any tips from people who do these regularly? especially curious how you handle logging in the field without losing your mind

haha the logging chaos is real, i still mess that up sometimes and ive been doing SOTA for like 4 years. what i do now is just use a paper log on the summit and enter everything into SOTA CSV or the database when i get home. yeah its a bit more work but trying to fiddle with an app when youre also doing a pileup and the wind is blowing and your fingers are cold is just not worth it. some people swear by the SOTA Goat app or Activator Log on android but i never really got on with them

also on the water thing, yeah that gets everyone at least once. i now just have a checklist i run through the night before and water is literally item number one because everything else you can kind of survive without but not that. congrats on the first activation though, sounds like you did great honestly, 4 contacts on rough conditions with a homebrew antenna is not bad at all

nice work getting out there. i just did my first activation a couple months ago and the pileup thing caught me totally off guard too, like i spotted myself not really expecting much and then suddenly people were calling and i panicked a little. you'll get the rhythm of it pretty quick though. for the 6 pointer just make sure you check the descent too not just the ascent, i learned that the hard way on a summit that looked easy on paper