so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, K-4872 if anyone's curious, and honestly i was kind of a nervous wreck going in. i'd been hunting from home for a few months and thought i had a decent handle on how it all worked but actually being the one calling CQ POTA is a completely different animal.

i brought my FT-891 and a random wire up in a tree, maybe 25 feet at the apex, fed with a 9:1 unun, and was running off a 20ah lifepo4 battery. setup took me maybe 30 minutes which i thought was pretty good for a first time. started on 40 meters around 1pm local and the pile got real deep real fast which i did not expect at all. had a few hunters come back to me on 20 as well once i spotted myself on the POTA app.

managed 47 QSOs total which qualifies it fine. the part i wasnt ready for is how fast you have to log when its busy, i use hamrs on my phone and it kept up ok but i was definitely dropping calls and asking for repeats more than i wanted to. anyone have tips for managing a pile up as a new activator? like do you just slow down and work them one at a time or is there some trick to it

47 on your first activation is really solid, dont sweat the pile up management stuff that just comes with reps. the main thing i tell people is dont be afraid to just take control of the frequency, if it gets messy you can say QRZ once and just wait a second before calling the next station. hunters are generally pretty patient especially with new activators, most of them have been doing it long enough to know.

one thing that helped me a lot was switching from logging on my phone to a small paper log when it gets really busy, then i upload to adif later. i know it sounds backwards but when youre in the middle of a pile having one less screen to worry about frees up a lot of mental bandwidth. hamrs is great but sometimes simple is better when youre learning.

also if 40 gets really heavy try jumping up to 17 or even 15 if conditions allow, sometimes a thinner pile on a higher band is way easier to work through and you still rack up the contacts pretty quick

nice work getting out there. i just did my 10th activation a couple weeks ago and i still get that adrenaline thing when the pile starts building. re: the logging thing, i actually switched to a bluetooth keyboard with my phone running hamrs and it made a huge difference, you can type calls a lot faster than tapping the screen. something to think about anyway.