so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, summit was only like a 2 mile hike so i figured itd be easy enough to test things out before i try anything serious. brought my KX2 and a linked dipole i built a few months ago, threw it up in a tree no problem, made my 4 contacts and qualified the summit but man it took forever. kept getting my dipole links tangled and the wind was just brutal up there, fingers were too cold to do anything right. also my phone GPS ate through my battery way faster than i expected and i nearly didnt have enough juice to get back to the car with navigation. on the plus side the 20m contacts came in super clean once i got everything sorted, worked a guy in Germany which i was not expecting at all from a little wire in a tree at 5 watts. gonna try a vertical next time maybe, something easier to deploy

yeah the linked dipole tangles are a rite of passage honestly, i went through the same thing my first few activations. what i do now is wind each link section separately onto a little piece of cardboard before i pack it, keeps things from turning into a bird nest. and yeah bring a separate battery bank just for the phone, learned that one the hard way too after nearly getting stuck on a ridge in the dark

Germany at 5w from a summit thats pretty sick, what band were you on when that happened? ive been doing POTA mostly but thinking about adding SOTA, just worried about the hiking part since most summits near me are not exactly casual walks