so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state forest about 45 minutes from my house, K-4857 if anyone's been there. i was honestly pretty nervous going in because ive heard people say the first one is always kind of chaotic and yeah it kind of was but in a good way i guess.

set up my buddistick on a small tripod, ran about 30 feet of coax to my ft-891 in the car, and just started calling CQ POTA on 40 meters around 10am local. i wasnt expecting much but within maybe 3 or 4 minutes i had my first contact and then it just kind of snowballed from there. ended up with 23 QSOs in about an hour and a half which i know isnt huge but for a first activation i was pretty happy.

my question is about the logging — i was using hamrs on my phone and it seemed fine but i noticed when i uploaded to the pota website it flagged a couple contacts as duplicates even though i dont think they were? like same callsign but different bands. does the system count those separately or does it just count one toward your 10 minimum? and also when do hunters actually see your spot if you self-spot through the app, is there a delay?

congrats on the first one, 23 QSOs is actually a solid debut especially on just 40m with a vertical. some people struggle to get their 10 on a bad day.

on the duplicate thing — yeah the pota system does count same callsign on different bands as separate valid QSOs, so if you worked W4ABC on 40 and then again on 20 those both count. what it flags as duplicates is same callsign same band same mode, which is fine it just wont count the second one toward your total but it doesnt penalize you or anything. just leave them in the log when you upload, the system handles it automatically.

the self-spot delay is usually pretty minimal in my experience, like under a minute most of the time if you have decent cell signal. the hunters are watching that page constantly trust me, sometimes i swear they show up faster than should be physically possible lol. if you're in a dead zone for cell you can also ask someone to spot you on the POTA discord or just post to the groups.io list before you head out so people know roughly when to expect you.

yeah same callsign different bands totally counts separately, learned that after my second activation when i was confused about my QSO count too. the website dashboard breaks it all down once the log processes which usually takes a day or so.

also just wanna say K-4857 is on my list to hunt, never heard anyone from there. might try to catch you if you go back out there