so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend up on a local summit here in western NC, been wanting to do this for like two years and kept putting it off. anyway packed up my KX2 and a 20m end fed and a little tripod mast thing and hiked up about 45 minutes to the top. got everything set up and... yeah the wire kept catching in the trees on the way up and i lost like a whole section of the counterpoise somewhere on the trail. so im up there with basically half an antenna and no cell signal to look anything up.

ended up making contact with 4 stations on 20m which i think technically counts but it was a mess. the band was also kind of dead when i was up there around noon which i know now is not ideal. going again next month and bringing way more wire than i think i need and also a proper antenna bag instead of just stuffing it in my pack. anyone else have a disaster first activation story

haha yeah my first one i forgot the coax. like the actual coax to connect the radio to the antenna. stood up there for a minute just staring at my bag wondering what felt wrong and then it hit me. had to use a random bit of RG-174 i found at the bottom of my kit bag that was probably 3 feet long, not ideal but it worked enough to get the 4 contacts. now i have a laminated checklist that lives in the top of my go bag permanently.

4 contacts still counts, you activated it. dont be too hard on yourself. i did my first POTA last spring and spent the first 20 minutes just trying to figure out why my audio sounded terrible on every contact and it turned out i had the mic gain cranked way too high from some testing i did at home. everyone was just being polite about it i think. the noon thing is real though, early morning or late afternoon is way better for 20m in my experience at least on the east coast