so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, K-4857 if anyone knows it. been meaning to do this for like a year and just kept putting it off. anyway i threw my kx2 in a backpack with a 40m end fed and a little tripod mast and hiked out to a picnic table near the trailhead.

got my 10 contacts which was great, took maybe 25 minutes once i found a clear frequency on 40, but i had a couple things happen that i wasnt sure about. first one -- i spotted myself on the POTA app but then a guy came back to me and i could barely hear him, like 53 at best, but he was logging me as a contact. does that count for both of us? i logged him but i wasnt confident we actually completed the QSO. second thing is i had a couple hunters show up on frequency calling other calls, not mine, which was confusing. are they just hunting multiple activators at once or did they stumble onto my freq by accident?

also is there a trick to uploading the log, i used the adif from my kx2 but the POTA site kept giving me an error about field formats or something. ended up just manually entering them which took forever.

congrats on the first one, that feeling when you hit 10 never really gets old honestly. on the QSO question -- yeah if you both logged it, it counts, even if the signal was rough. a completed exchange is a completed exchange. POTA isnt super strict about signal reports, as long as you got the callsign right and they got yours. if you were unsure about a specific contact just mark it as questionable in your notes but honestly 53 is workable, people make contacts through way worse.

the hunters calling other calls on your frequency happens all the time. sometimes guys are running POTA skimmer or just watching the spots and they'll land near you while you're between QSOs and start calling whoever they're after. kind of annoying but its not really anything you did wrong, just the nature of a busy POTA pileup day. if it gets bad just say QRZ and your callsign again and usually the frequency sorts itself out.

for the adif upload thing -- the kx2 sometimes spits out an adif where the date format or the frequency field isnt exactly what the POTA site wants. i just run mine through ADIF Master (free utility) to clean it up before uploading and havent had a problem since. or you can export directly from Log4OM if you use that. manually entering 10 contacts isnt terrible but yeah definitely fix that before your next one.

oh man i remember my first activation, i was so nervous i forgot to actually say the park reference on half my contacts haha. the hunters calling other callsigns thing threw me off too at first. theyre definitely just hunting multiple activators, especially on a busy weekend there could be 30+ activations going on at once and people are just spinning around the band grabbing them all. once you get comfortable youll probably start doing that too when youre not activating, its kind of addictive.

also welcome to the addiction, fair warning your log of "parks i need to activate" is going to grow way faster than you can actually go to them