so ive been a licensed tech for about a year and just upgraded to general last month and i've been reading about SOTA for a while now and finally decided to just go do it. picked out a local summit that's only worth 2 points, figured i'd start easy. i registered on the sotadata site and got my callsign set up but i'm still a little fuzzy on a few things.

first off, do i need to alert ahead of time or can i just show up and start operating? i've seen the alerts page on sotawatch but wasnt sure if that was like required or just a courtesy thing. also i'm planning to bring my ft-818 with a random wire antenna, probably just throw it over a branch or something. is 5 watts going to be enough to get my 4 contacts? i know i only need 4 to qualify the summit. and one more thing -- the activation zone, is that strictly the top or is there some flexibility there? the summit i picked has a pretty flat area near the top but i'm not sure exactly where the highest point is. thanks in advance, hope this makes sense

Welcome to SOTA, you're gonna love it. Alerts are definitely not required but they help a lot -- activators who alert usually get their 4 contacts way faster because chasers are already tuned in and watching for you. I'd post one a day or two ahead if you can, just go to sotawatch3.org and fill in the summit reference, your frequency and mode, and roughly what time you expect to be there. Even a loose time estimate helps.

The FT-818 at 5w will be totally fine for a 2 point summit. I've activated bigger summits with 5w and had no trouble, especially if there are chasers active that day. The random wire should work, maybe try to get it as high as you can and give yourself a good counterpoise. As for the activation zone -- it's the top 25 meters of prominence, not just the exact peak. So if the whole ridgeline up there is within 25 meters of the high point you're good to go anywhere in that area. Dont stress too much about finding the exact GPS coordinate of the summit, just get up near the top and you'll be in the zone.

yeah the alert thing is huge, i did my first activation without alerting and sat up there for almost 45 minutes before i finally got my 4 contacts. next time i alerted and had them in like 10 minutes. also self-spotting from the summit if you have cell service is a game changer, there's an app called SOTA Goat that lets you spot yourself and see incoming spots. good luck, what summit are you doing if you dont mind saying?