so i finally did my first activation last weekend, been chasing for about six months and figured it was time to actually get out there myself. picked a local summit that was only like a 2 point hill honestly but figured a low stakes one would be good to start with. threw the KX2 in the pack with my end fed and a little 4ah lipo and hiked up there saturday morning.

everything was going fine until i realized i forgot the counterpoise wire at home. just... sitting on my workbench. spent about 20 minutes improvising something with a bit of wire i had in my kit bag and honestly it was a mess, SWR was all over the place. managed to squeeze out 4 QSOs on 20m before the weather turned and i bailed. i know you need 4 to qualify the summit so technically it counts but it felt kind of scrappy. one of the QSOs was with a station that came back really weak and i only got a partial call so im not totally sure that one logged right.

anyway just wanted to share because it was kind of a comedy of errors but also i had a huge smile the whole time even when things werent working great. already planning the next one. does anyone else remember their first activation being kind of a disaster?

ha that sounds about right, mine wasnt much better. forgot to tighten the antenna connector and spent half the activation wondering why my signal reports were so bad. but yeah 4 QSOs qualifies the summit, thats the rule, and it goes in the log and on sotadata just the same as if you had a perfect day. dont stress the partial call too much, if you logged what you heard in good faith thats fine. the chasers are pretty understanding about propagation and marginal condtions.

the counterpoise thing is super common by the way, a lot of guys now just tape a short one directly to the feedpoint of the antenna so its always there as a backup. learned that trick the hard way myself

4 QSOs is 4 QSOs, summit is activated, points are points. welcome to the addiction. seriously though the fact that you improvised and still made it work is kind of the whole point of portable ops, things go wrong up there and you figure it out. i've activated maybe 80 summits at this point and something goes sideways on like half of them. wind, rain, gear issues, once a cow literally walked through my antenna. just part of it. what reference was the summit if you dont mind me asking, always curious to see what people are activating in different parts of the country