so i finally did my first activation last weekend, W4C/CM-005, not a super high pointer but figured it was a good starter summit to learn the ropes. drove up friday night, camped near the trailhead, and started the hike around 6am saturday. everything was going fine until i got maybe 200 yards from the actual summit and realized i had left my antenna wire in the car. not the whole kit, just the wire. so i had this whole setup and nothing to actually radiate with.

ended up improvising with some spare wire i had coiled in my pack from a previous project, no idea what length it was, just random wire i'd been carrying around. threw it over a branch, tuned it with my little manual tuner, and honestly it worked well enough. ran 10w from the FT-818 on 20m SSB and scraped together 4 contacts before the summit started getting cloudy and windy.

i know you need 4 for activation credit so i was sweating it a little at the end. the last contact was some guy who came back really weak and i wasnt sure he copied my callsign right but he did and i got it logged. checked SOTAwatch when i got home and the spot went through fine.

anyway moral of the story i guess is carry a checklist because standing there realizing what you forgot when youre halfway up a mountain is a very specific kind of awful feeling. also maybe bring more wire than you think you need just in general.

haha yeah the forgotten antenna wire thing is basically a rite of passage at this point, i think most of us have had some version of that moment. i once made it all the way to the summit of a 6 pointer before realizing my coax adapter was sitting on my desk at home. had to try a direct connect situation that was just embarrassing.

but congrats on the activation, 4 contacts is 4 contacts and that wire improvisation actually sounds like decent operating instinct. a lot of guys freeze up when stuff goes wrong in the field and you just worked around it. also 20m SSB at 10w from a summit usually pulls in chasers pretty reliably especially if you self-spot on SOTAwatch beforehand, which it sounds like you did. once you get a few more activations under your belt you might want to try adding 40m into the mix, sometimes when 20 is being weird the chasers are all sitting on 40 waiting.

nice work getting those 4, i know that last contact sweating feeling all too well lol. i keep a laminated checklist in the top pocket of my pack now, took me two embarrassing trips to get to that point. the random wire trick is actually something worth thinking about on purpose too, some guys swear by just carrying 50 feet of random wire and a tuner and calling it good instead of bothering with a specific cut dipole.