so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state forest near me and honestly i was kind of nervous going in because ive been licensed for about two years but mostly just done local stuff on the 2m repeater and a little HF from home. a buddy convinced me to try POTA and i figured why not give it a shot.

brought my ft-891 and a random wire i threw together, ran it up a tree with a throw line. took me probably 45 minutes to get set up which i know is embarassing but whatever, first time. got on 40m around 10am local and logged my first QSO within like 3 minutes which i did not expect at all. ended up with 23 contacts in about an hour and a half, enough to count as a valid activation.

few things i learned the hard way -- upload your activation to the POTA website before you leave the park if you can, or at least log your park reference number correctly because i almost put the wrong one in. also hunters are FAST, like i called CQ POTA once and had a small pileup within a minute. wasnt ready for that honestly.

anyway if anyones been on the fence about trying it, just go. you dont need fancy gear, my setup was pretty basic and it worked fine.

congrats on the first one, those early activations are always memorable. 23 contacts is a solid debut, some people struggle to get to 10 on their first outing especially if the bands arent cooperating.

one thing that helped me a lot when i was starting out was spotting yourself on the POTA website before you even start calling CQ. you can do it from your phone, just go to pota.app and add a spot for yourself with your callsign, frequency and park reference. the hunters watch that constantly and youll get a pile almost immediately instead of calling into the void for 20 minutes. once you get comfortable with that the whole process gets smoother. i usually spot myself, get set up, and by the time im actually ready to operate there are already people waiting.

also dont stress about the wrong park reference thing, ive seen people activate the completely wrong park and not realize until they got home. the POTA folks are pretty understanding as long as you sort it out.

nice, im jealous. ive been meaning to do my first activation for months now but i keep talking myself out of it because i dont have a good portable antenna sorted yet. what kind of random wire length did you end up using? im trying to figure out if i should just build something or grab one of those end fed things everyone seems to use for POTA.