so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, been putting it off forever because i kept convincing myself i needed more gear or a better antenna or whatever. finally just threw the KX2 in a bag with my end fed and drove out there.

setup took longer than expected because the trees werent cooperating and i ended up with a pretty sad sloping wire that was maybe 20 feet at the high end. got on 40m around 1pm and honestly thought nobody was gonna hear me because my signal felt weak on the built in tuner. started calling CQ POTA and within like 3 minutes i had a small pileup going which was wild. ended up with 22 QSOs in about 40 minutes before the battery started getting low.

the part that went sideways was i forgot to actually log the park reference in the notes field for like half the contacts and had to go back and manually edit everything in HAMRS before uploading. also realized after the fact that i was on the wrong frequency for a while, had drifted a bit and didnt notice. but the upload went through fine and it shows as activated now so im not complaining.

for anyone whos been on the fence about trying it, just go. the gear doesnt need to be perfect and honestly the hunters are super patient with new activators. had one guy tell me to slow down on my call because i was rushing and he was totally nice about it.

congrats on the first one, that feeling when the pileup starts and youre out in the middle of nowhere with a wire in a tree is pretty hard to beat. dont sweat the logging stuff, everyone fumbles that early on. i used HAMRS for my first dozen or so activations and kept making little mistakes, now i use the POTA app directly and it uploads basically automatically which helps a lot.

40m at midday can be hit or miss depending on conditions but sounds like you picked a decent time. if you go back to the same park try getting there earlier and maybe throw a line over a higher branch, even getting your apex up to 30 feet makes a noticeable difference. and yeah the hunters community is genuinely one of the nicer corners of ham radio, people are pretty forgiving especially when they can tell youre new to it.

22 QSOs first time out with a sloping end fed and a low battery is honestly pretty solid. i had like 11 on my first activation and thought i was doing great haha. which state park was it if you dont mind me asking, im always looking for new references within driving distance