so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, K-4821 if anyone wants to look it up. i was honestly pretty nervous going in because i'd been hunting for about 3 months and kind of understood how it worked from that side but actually being the activator felt totally different. set up my buddipole on a picnic table near the parking area, ran about 50 watts on 40m and 20m with my IC-7300, logged on paper first then transferred to ADIF later which was kind of a pain but it worked.

ended up with 34 QSOs in about 2 hours which felt pretty good for a first time, got the activation confirmed. couple things i noticed that nobody really told me ahead of time - it helps a LOT to spot yourself on POTAspots before you even make your first call because the hunters pile on almost immediately once they see you're there. also 40m was way more productive in the morning than i expected, i kind of assumed 20m would be where all the action is but honestly it was split pretty evenly.

anyway curious if anyone has tips for doing multiple parks in one day, like a park run. seems like it would be fun but i dont really know how people plan the routes or if theres a minimum time you need to spend at each one

congrats on the first activation, that feeling when the pile up hits after you spot yourself is something else. 34 QSOs is solid, some parks take a couple tries to get the 10 minimum depending on conditions and how remote you are.

for park runs it's honestly just planning and not being too ambitious at first. i'd say map out your parks using the POTA website and look at how far apart they actually are by road, not straight line distance. some guys try to hit 5 or 6 parks in a day and burn themselves out driving, or they spend too long at one park and run out of daylight. i usually aim for 3 or maybe 4 parks if they're reasonably close together. you still need 10 unique callsigns at each park to get credit so dont rush yourself off a frequency before you're confident you've got it.

one thing that really helped me was pre-loading all the park references in my logging software before i left the house, saves time fumbling around in the field. also let people know on the POTA activators facebook group or whatever if you're planning a run, sometimes folks will specifically watch for you hunting across multiple references which is a nice little community thing

oh man i just did my second activation last month and i'm already obsessed with this program. the spotting yourself tip is huge, i didn't do it my first time and just called CQ for like 20 minutes with almost nothing. second time i spotted right away and had contacts within maybe 2 minutes it was wild

i havent done a park run yet but it's definitely on my list, looks like so much fun watching some of those videos people post