so i finally did my first activation last weekend, went up to a local W4 summit, nothing crazy, maybe a 2 mile hike in. brought my ft-818 and a linked dipole i made from a kit, ran it off a 3ah lipo and honestly it went smoother than i expected. made 4 contacts on 20m SSB which i know is the minimum for a valid activation so i was pretty relieved.

couple things i wanted to ask though. first, i uploaded to sotadata the same night but i dont see my activator points yet, is there usually a delay or did i mess something up? second, i noticed some of the chasers who called me were already in the log before i even announced on the SOTAwatch cluster, is that normal? like do people just scan around for portable stations calling CQ SOTA or something?

also one of the guys gave me a 59 and then asked for my summit reference twice, which made me feel like maybe my audio wasnt great. running the mic pretty close to my face out of habit from handheld use, wondering if thats an issue with the 818 internal mic. anyway overall stoked and already looking at my next one, theres a W4T summit about 45 min from me that looks doable

congrats on the first one, that feeling when you hit the 4th contact is pretty great isnt it. on the sotadata thing, sometimes it takes a few hours to show up, occasionally longer if the server is being weird. if its been more than a day or so double check that you entered the summit reference correctly, like even a small typo in the reference will cause it to not match. the points should show up in your activator score once the log processes.

and yeah the chasers thing is totally normal, a lot of the serious chasers have their radios parked on certain SOTA frequencies like 14.285 or 14.310 and they just hear you calling CQ SOTA and pile in. some of them also watch SOTAwatch alerts but plenty just stumble onto activators by scanning. actually makes it kind of fun when someone finds you without an alert.

the audio question, the 818 internal mic can be a little bassy if youre real close to it, try backing off a bit or there are aftermarket mics that work better for portable use. some folks use a cheap headset and it cleans things up a lot. dont sweat the 59 reports too much though, a lot of chasers just throw that out reflexively.

nice work on the activation. im pretty new to chasing myself and i can tell you i absolutely just tune around looking for CQ SOTA, i check sotawatch but half the time the alerts are wrong or the activator is already done by the time i see it lol. so yeah dont be surprised when chasers appear out of nowhere, thats just how it goes.