so i finally did my first activation last weekend, went up to a local summit here in the Appalachians, W4V/SH-001 or something like that, took me forever to find the actual reference on the database but eventually got it sorted. brought my FT-818 and a linked dipole i built from a kit, ran it up a telescoping pole and just kind of... hoped for the best honestly.

made 4 contacts on 40m SSB which i know is the minimum to qualify but man it felt close. tried 20m for a bit but wasnt getting much, maybe my antenna angle was wrong or just bad timing, it was around 2pm local. also tried calling on the SOTA frequencies but im not sure i had those right, was using 7.285 which i thought was the common one but now reading more it seems like 7.195 gets used too? little confused on that.

anyway the bigger question i have is about self-spotting. i had cell service up there barely enough to load sotawatch and i spotted myself but by the time chasers would have seen it i was already done with most of my contacts. do people usually alert in advance and then spot when they get on air? feels like i was doing it backwards. also curious if anyone does CW only activations and if thats harder to get the 4 contacts or actually easier because more chasers monitor CW frequencies

congrats on the first activation, that feeling of getting your 4 and qualifying is pretty great even if it felt tight. you definitely had the process a little backwards yeah -- alerting on sotawatch ahead of time (even just the night before or morning of) is what gets chasers ready and watching for your spot. then when youre on the summit and actually transmitting you spot yourself and the chasers who set up alerts on their phone apps will see it almost immediately and start calling. the self-spot-while-still-on-air thing clicks pretty fast once you do it a couple times.

on the frequencies, 7.285 is fine and does get used but a lot of sota activity especially in the US gravitates toward 7.195 and also watch for what other activators are using when you look at recent spots, thats honestly the best way to figure out where the action is in your region. some areas have slightly different habits.

and CW is genuinely easier to get 4 contacts in my experience, you have a bigger pool of chasers listening and CW carries a lot further with the same power. i run 5 watts CW from a KX2 and rarely have trouble qualifying even from obscure summits

im pretty new to chasing but from the other side -- when i see a spot come up on the app i basically drop whatever im doing and go find the frequency lol. the alert system is huge, i have email alerts set for certain regions and when an activator posts an alert i know roughly when to listen. if you just show up and spot with no alert its kind of pot luck whether anyone catches it especially on a weekday

also 4 contacts on your first time out is solid, i know some people who blanked their first few tries because of antenna issues or just bad condx. the linked dipole setup sounds like it worked well enough